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I rolled my eyes as I squatted down, pushing our bedrolls together. “Don’t be so dramatic,” I said, grabbing his hand and tugging him down to the floor with me. “I’m just following your example. There’s no way the two of us can snuggle together in this heat if we’re fully clothed.”
Einar growled as I tucked myself against him, nestling my cheek against his chest and tucking my head beneath his chin. “I want to do a lot more than snuggle with you,” he said, draping his arm around me.
“I know.” I traced the flames swirling across his left pectoral with a fingertip, wondering how he would react if I used my tongue instead. But if I did that, we definitely wouldn’t be getting any sleep. And I needed Einar to rest.
Oh, well. I’d satisfy my curiosity another time.
Sighing deeply, I tossed my leg over Einar’s, then rubbed my hand in soothing circles across his abdomen. He rumbled contentedly, and I smiled as a pleasantly sleepy fog descended over my mind. I’d never cuddled like this before with anyone, yet it felt so natural, so right. Smiling, I breathed in Einar’s wood-smoke and crisp, starry night scent, and allowed it to sweep me away from my troubles, if only for a few hours.
* * *
“You guys!” Quye squealed, throwing the door open with a bang. I shot up from a dead sleep, and Einar leapt to his feet, body braced for a threat. I looked wildly around the room and toward the window, searching for any kind of threat, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. “Youhaveto come and see what I’ve found!”
She made to dash out of the room, but Einar grabbed her by the wrist, lightning-quick. “Why are you only waking us now?” he demanded, using his free hand to point toward the window. “The sun is up!”
I blinked, realizing he was right—the sky had lightened from pitch black to a depressing grey. “You never woke me for my watch,” I said, scrubbing the sleep dust from my eyes. “Why?”
Quye rolled her eyes. “You guys are seriously asking me thisnow?”
“Yes!”
Her lips twitched as we yelled the word in unison, some of the annoyance disappearing from her face. “I came in to wake you for your shift a few hours ago, but the two of you looked so cute snuggled up together that I decided to let you both sleep,” she said. “I spent most of the day dozing anyway, so I wasn’t tired, and I can sleep on the flight again.” She gave us both a gentle smile. “This was your last night together for a while. I wanted to let you two spend it together.”
A lump swelled in my throat at the compassion of that gesture, and I could feel Einar’s gratitude through our half-formed bond. “Well, in that case,” he said gruffly, a little thrown off by Quye’s admission. “Show us what you found.”
“Finally!” Quye spun on her heel and flounced through the door, leaving us to follow in her wake. She must have been telling the truth about not needing any sleep—she zipped through the hall and up the winding staircase, and we had to hustle to keep up with her.
“Don’t you remember thinking this room seemed weirdly small yesterday?” Quye asked as she led us into what had once been a study.
“Yes,” I admitted. It was spacious enough for its purpose, the remnants of a sitting area, desk, and chairs scattered across the space, but it was about a third smaller than the other tower floors.
“Well, there’s a reason for that.” Quye walked over to the far wall and rapped on one of the bricks. It retreated, and the wall swung open, revealing a dusty room lined with shelves beyond.
“A hidden library?” I asked as she disappeared through the door. Einar and I followed behind her, and I sneezed as a cloud of dust invaded my nostrils. “Giant’s teeth,” I coughed, fanning the dust motes away from my face. “This room needs to be aired out.”
“I considered that, but most of the books have already crumbled to dust, so I didn’t want to risk it.” She rapped on the grimy window, which had miraculously managed to survive intact. “It’s only thanks to this that any of the books have survived—they’re all incredibly ancient, and no one has touched them for a very long time. In fact, I strongly suspect that whoever owned this tower didn’t even know about this place, Einar.”
“Why do you say that?” Einar asked, rubbing beneath his nose.
“Because…” Quye extended a hand toward the small desk located just beneath the window, stirring the air there. A letter slowly lifted from the wooden surface and drifted through the air to hover before her. “This letter was written by a fire fae.”
Shock ricocheted through me, and Einar and I were at Quye’s side in an instant, reading the yellowed parchment over her shoulder. It was nearly translucent with age, the writing faded and in old-fashioned script.
“I have no idea what this says,” Einar complained. “It’s not written in the modern tongue.”
“Something about a ritual, I think?” I squinted, trying to decipher the words, but my grasp of the old fae tongue was rusty at best.
Quye, fortunately, had no such limitation. “It’s a letter from the fire fae king to his cousin, Enbry,” she told us. “They’re discussing a negotiation with the witchlings—some kind of spell that will bring them more power, but that the witchlings insisted was too dangerous to perform.”
Einar shifted uneasily. “We dragons have unearthed fire fae relics and pieces of history in the past, but we tend to avoid them,” he admitted.
“Are you serious?” I stared at him. “But you could have found out the truth behind what really happened to them?”
“To what purpose?” Einar asked, shrugging his shoulders, his brows knitting in frustration. “Even if we had found out the truth behind their disappearance, it’s not like the rest of the fae would have absolved us of wrongdoing. They just wanted an excuse to kill us all off so they could take Hearthfyre’s resources for themselves.” His mouth twisted, and I could feel his bitterness seeping through the bond. “Besides, our elders insisted that the relics were cursed, and given that the fire fae were wiped off the map of Ediria, we were inclined to believe that. It didn’t seem worth testing the theory.”
“Well, I’d say it’s worth—” Quye began, then went rigid. Her head snapped back, eyes going white, and the letter fluttered to the floor as she lost control of her magic. I shouted, grabbing at her arm, but no sooner had the fit started did her head snap back up, her body relaxing.
“Huh.” She blinked.
