“Are we safe here?” she wrote.
Aruna hesitated longer than she would have liked. “Don’t go too far without me,” he wrote eventually.
“Do they know what you did at the outpost?”
“I don’t think they know. By the time they find out, we’ll be gone. We’ve been waiting for you to heal and for Kadaki to recover after overexerting herself. You both seem well enough for us to leave in a day or so.” He paused, then continued, “I don’t want to get in any more fights with anyone.”
That seemed like a monumental task. “Where will we go?”
He just shook his head.
After a beat, she wrote, “Can I have the sword back?”
Aruna looked down at the paper, then up at her, solemn. He hadn’t said anything about what she’d done back at the ruins, which seemed intentional at that point. He was avoiding the subject.
When he balked, she thought he was going to refuse. But then he took the sword, still in its sheath, off his belt, and handed it to her. She fastened it on her own belt, glad to be armed again.
“The two of you never spoke to each other before the captain gave him the translator?” Kadaki asked, squinting. “You just wrote in that book?”
“We didn’t even have a book for a long time. The book is a luxury. Before that, we wrote in sand with sticks.”
“Why talk at all?” Kadaki said. “He was holding you hostage, wasn’t he? Why would he need to communicate anything other than ‘walk where I point’?”
“There were other things,” Novikke said, shrugging.
“Because they wanted to shag,” Neiryn supplied.
Kadaki raised her eyebrows, as if that had never occurred to her. “Oh.”
A flash in the distance caught Novikke’s attention. A collection of glowing eyes shone out of the darkness behind a house, making her tense in alarm. It took her a moment to realize that they were probably Varai and not animals, and that they were definitely too low to the ground to be grown elves.
It was kids. A bunch of kids staring at the strange visitors. She smiled, cautiously amused.
“When was the last time there were non-Varai in this village, do you think?” she said.
“Not for as long as anyone here remembers, according to Aruna,” Kadaki replied. “And elves remember a great deal.”
Something moved in the corner of Novikke’s eye. She turned to see an indistinct shadow hovering beside her. No sooner had she turned than the shadow solidified into a humanoid shape—a small boy with indigo hair and luminous violet eyes. Novikke jumped.
“Hello!” said the boy loudly, grinning at her reaction to his sudden appearance.
She exhaled sharply. She really shouldn’t be annoyed, she supposed. It was her own fault if she let herself be startled by a child. “Hello,” she said, staring. She’d never seen a night elf child. She didn’t know why it felt like such a strange sight—every race had children, obviously. Why hadn’t she ever thought about what Varai looked like when they were young?
He carefully leaned forward from her side to stare at her, afraid of getting too close. He was clutching a black kitten to his chest with one hand and was ignoring its squirming. He peeked up at Aruna, as if making sure he wasn’t going to be reprimanded.
“Hello,” he said again.
Novikke smiled, sensing that it was the only Ardanian word he knew. “Hello,” she said again.
Aruna held up the notebook. “My cousin,” he’d written. “Sorry.”
A taller shadow appeared at the boy’s side, and then a young girl popped into existence.
“Hello,” the girl said quietly, staring with large eyes. She looked more nervous than the boy.
“Hello,” Novikke said.
More shadows came, and soon there was a small cluster of them—most too shy to show themselves. There was a chorus of hellos, and then laughter when Novikke responded. Eventually Aruna shooed them away with a few words and a wave of his hand. They all giggled, and one by one they ran off.
Novikke thought of Zaiur suddenly. She imagined Ardanian soldiers sweeping through the village, killing everyone in their path, like he’d said.
She caught Aruna’s eye, feeling guilty again. He looked confused by her expression, not knowing what she was thinking of.
“This is weird,” Novikke said quietly.
“Isn’t it awful?” Neiryn said. “I told you they lived in huts. I don’t know how anyone can live like this. It’s like we’re still camping. Everything is so dirty. I’ve been here less than a day and it feels like weeks.”
“It looks a lot like the village where I grew up in Ardani, actually.”
He looked taken aback, and then uncomfortable. “Oh.”
She crossed her arms on her knees, leaning toward the warmth of the fire. “So what do we do now?” she asked. No one answered.
She’d killed Theros. Vissarion and Aleka and Thala had all seen it. She couldn’t go back to the army.
They were back to where they’d been before the Ardanians had captured them. There was nowhere in particular to go. No future that seemed promising. Everything was open-ended and uncertain.
They certainly couldn’t stay in the forest forever.
She sighed. “Say, Kadaki. Maybe you could magic us up some wine?”
Kadaki slowly looked up, giving her a withering look. “Sure, I suppose I didn’t do enough already. It’s not like I’ve already overdrawn my magic twice over and almost killed myself in the process of single-handedly saving all of Kuda Varai, and then saving you as well since you decided it would be a good idea to stab yourself with a sword. All that’s not enough, I guess. Mages are just an endless supply of free miracles, aren’t they? Of course. Just keep asking for more. It’s no trouble.”
Novikke raised her hands in surrender. “All right! Sorry.”
Neiryn put a hand on Kadaki’s shoulder. “We can leave soon, now that you’re finally awake,” he said to Novikke. Over his shoulder, Novikke caught sight of a pair of Varai watching them. Each wore a sword on their hip.
“That would probably be for the best,” she said.
“We should stay a little longer,” Kadaki said quickly. When the others gave her questioning looks, she added, “I’m still not feeling well. And I need to spend some more time on Novikke.”
“I feel okay,” Novikke said with a shrug.
“One more day,” Kadaki insisted.
Novikke gave Neiryn a questioning look. He shrugged.
“If that’s what you think is best,” Novikke said. “Maybe we should try to make ourselves less obtrusive, in that case.”
“We came outside because we were trying to make ourselves less obtrusive to Shadri,” Neiryn said. “But with the way the other villagers have been looking at us out here, I’m beginning to think that was a mistake.”
“Shadri?”
“Our host. I gather she’s not thrilled with our presence.”
“Well, she’ll probably be even less pleased if her guests end up causing a scene in the middle of the village.”
Neiryn considered that for a moment. He shot another glance at a group of Varai who had stopped nearby to glower at them. “You have a point,” he said. “All right. Let’s go.”
Chapter 2
The four of them sat around Aruna’s aunt’s kitchen table. They all fell silent when the door opened again a few minutes after their arrival.
Aruna’s sharp-faced aunt, Shadri, walked in, and slowed when her eyes fell on them. She tipped her nose up and brushed past them, saying something in Varai as she passed. Aruna gave a nervous smile and said something that made the woman huff sarcastically in response.
She set down a basket and set about fixing the fire in the hearth, which had dwindled while she’d been away. Aruna jumped up to help her, but she impatiently shooed him away.
The violet-eyed boy Novikke had met earlier—Aruna said his name was Nhazin—came through the door next, dragging a large stick with him. Shadri looked up and
snapped something at him. Nhazin sighed and tossed the stick outside. He was halfway across the room again when she barked at him, pointing at the door. The boy glowered, returned to the entryway, and dutifully wiped his feet on the mat before coming in again.
Their conversation came to an end now that there were other people there to overhear. They sat close to the table, trying not to be any more intrusive than they had to. Nhazin wandered around the edge of the room, playing with the corner of a rug or poking at the fire while he pretended not to stare at them.
Shadri mostly ignored them, but still shot them continual suspicious, annoyed glances.
Novikke wrote in the notebook while Neiryn and Kadaki quietly began discussing something related to the ruin’s magic that was too esoteric for her to parse. “She doesn’t like us being here,” she observed.
“No,” Aruna wrote, not really looking at her. He seemed distracted. “Housing our enemies does not endear her to the rest of the village. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I had any other option.”
“But she let us stay anyway?”
He shrugged. “I knew she wouldn’t turn us away.”
“Was it her bed I was sleeping in?”
“Yes.”
“Ash. Please apologize to her for me. You could have just put me on the floor somewhere, I’d not have known the difference.”
He laughed under his breath.
Shadri had started cooking something. She had a stack of some kind of purple root vegetable that she was cutting into slices and throwing into a pot. Aruna tried to help her again, and she turned him away once more. He reluctantly returned to his seat at the table, frowning.
A while later, Neiryn got up and stood by her while she worked. She glanced up at him, disinterested, and went back to her chopping.
But he talked to her, wearing his best smile, the one that improved his already handsome face by at least several notches. Shadri gave perfunctory responses. Over the course of a few minutes, Novikke watched the angry tension drain from the woman’s shoulders. After another few minutes, Shadri laughed aloud at a joke he’d made.
Eventually she started giving him tasks to assist with—cutting or cleaning or fetching this or that—which, to Novikke’s surprise, he performed gladly and adeptly. Aruna watched all of this with a faintly annoyed expression.
She was even more surprised when something Neiryn said made Shadri laugh so heartily that she stopped in the middle of stirring a pot and playfully slapped his arm. Her hand remained touching him a little longer than Novikke had expected it to.
The corners of Neiryn’s lips curved up. His eyes slid toward Novikke and Aruna, gloating. Novikke, grudgingly impressed, mimed applause. Aruna rolled his eyes.
Kadaki was the only one not watching. She had inadvertently caught Nhazin’s attention and was performing an impromptu magic show. She’d seemed uncertain at first, but the longer it went on, the more pleased she looked with the uncritical attention.
Novikke realized, after watching for a while, that she’d been smiling without meaning to. It was all pleasantly domestic.
When was the last time she had spent time with family or friends? Not since her parents had passed, at least. This kind of scene was foreign to her these days.
“Novikke,” Aruna said quietly. He’d gotten up from the table, carrying the notebook in one hand. He jerked his head toward the door.
Novikke followed him out into the darkness. He took her hand and pulled her off the porch, around the corner, to the back of the house. He stopped beside the back wall and turned to her. The night was dark, and the shadows behind the house were pitch black. She heard pages turning. She pulled out her mage torch.
His hand penciled letters in the book. Just one word, and then he stopped. He held the pencil against the paper, as if he’d planned to write more but didn’t know how to finish. He gave up and held it out to her.
“Why?” he’d written.
Why?
She didn’t have to ask what he meant. Why had she nearly killed herself to save him?
How could she begin to answer?
She studied his face, lit with the blue light of the mage torch. She couldn’t quite tell what he was feeling. He looked… serious. She could not guess what he hoped to hear her say.
She’d done it because that moment had sent her into a deeper and more horrifying depth of Panic than she’d ever experienced. It had yawned before her, a gaping void of despair, of knowing he was about to die and that she was powerless to stop it. The suddenness and inevitability of it, the years-long seconds of knowing what was coming and having to watch and wait for it to come, had been torture.
She would have done anything, in that instant, to stop it.
It had been a panicked, spur-of-the-moment reaction that had been more instinct and wild emotion than anything. But even now, after everything had calmed down, the thought of losing him frightened her.
Until now, she’d tried not to think about that fact, not too loudly or for too long, because if she dwelled on those thoughts too much, she’d have to acknowledge they were real.
And then where would she be? A jobless, homeless Ardanian woman on the bad side of the law, with far too strong an attachment to a Varai man. There was no future in that. Pursuing one could only end in failure and misery.
She couldn’t want him like that. She didn’t want to want him like that.
But she did. When had that happened?
Aruna let out a bitterly amused breath at the stretch of silence. He pointed to the word in the book again, giving her a desperate look.
She took the book from him. “You don’t know what it was like to see you that way,” she wrote.
“I do know what it’s like,” he wrote back indignantly.
Words failed her. She dropped the light and lifted her hands to his arms, holding him by the shoulders. She wasn’t brave enough to speak aloud the things she was thinking—or write them down.
She brought her hands slowly to either side of his face. His eyes burned into hers, unblinking. Her thumbs stroked his cheekbones and his head tilted very slightly to lean into the touch. Her fingers brushed over his strange pointed ears and into unnaturally oil-black hair.
Gods, he was beautiful. She wondered if he realized.
He stepped closer to her, putting his back to the soft glow of the mage torch and framing her in black.
She stood pinned between him and the wall, his darkness and warmth around her. His head tilted down, hiding his face in the dark, but she could feel the closeness of him, could feel his breath on her skin. She waited, hardly breathing. He took a breath that seemed anticipatory, hesitating.
He’d asked her why, but he already knew. They both knew. They both knew they both knew. The silence felt painfully heavy with that unspoken knowledge.
She felt his fingers twitch against her side. Then he dropped the book beside her light and leaned in.
His lips brushed hers as his hand pressed against the small of her back, pulling her into him. She let him part her lips, let him press between them.
His hand rose and knotted in her hair as his tongue brushed hers. She arched into him as twinges of heat ran from her throat to her sex. There was a spark of pain beneath her bandages, and she flinched. Aruna stopped, startled, and began to pull away, and she pulled him back impatiently.
She slid a hand between them and cupped the hard outline of his cock through his pants. He gave a soft groan into her mouth, and kissed her harder.
She stuck out a foot to kick at the fallen mage torch, and after a few tries, it turned off. Blinded in the dark, she started to fumble with the ties on his pants until he caught her hands and pulled them away.
He held one of her hands back against the wall, and with his other he hurriedly unlaced her pants. He slid a hand under fabric, his hand cool against her bare skin. His fingers brushed lower, his touch electric.
She bit her lip as a finger sank into slick folds. He pulled back to tip his forehead a
gainst hers, watching her react to his touch. A second finger joined the first, pressing deftly over sensitive skin and drawing pleasure from her with each stroke.
He murmured something to her. It sounded like a question.
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. Whatever it was, yes.
Her every muscle had gone tight with need. Her free hand pressed against his unyielding chest to steady herself. It was all she could do to keep her feet under her. His presence was suddenly overwhelming, covering and pressing against every part of her.
Night Elves of Ardani: Book Three: Invocation Page 2