Fear gripped her. She tried to remember which of them had slept on which side of the room. Was the remaining bedroll Aruna’s or Zaiur’s?
Had he finally left her with him? Was this it?
The door creaked open, and Novikke sat upright in a rush, which caused pain to shoot through her arm. She hissed through her teeth and stared at the door as someone walked through.
Aruna paused in the doorway and looked at her.
Novikke must have looked strange, because his brows came together in a sort-of-amused, sort-of-confused frown. She straightened, pulling a hand through her disheveled hair. Aruna started packing his things.
She expected Zaiur to be waiting for them outside. But when they left the tower, Aruna started down a path through the trees and Zaiur was still nowhere to be seen.
Novikke trotted after Aruna. “Where—” she began. He slowed enough to look back at her. “Where is Zaiur?”
He shook his head and pointed vaguely into the forest in the opposite direction from where they were heading. Novikke raised her eyebrows. Aruna turned and kept walking, waving for her to follow.
A wave of relief washed over her. By the Five, she was almost happy. It was nearly enough to make her forget that she was still marching toward her death.
“Good riddance,” she said under her breath.
They walked in silence for a long time, comfortably ignoring each other until they came to the top of a steep ridge. The trees had opened up, allowing them a view of the vast valley beyond.
Aruna paused there, and Novikke gazed out at the expanse of forest and fields. Moonlight glinted off a lake in the distance.
Aruna was watching the woods behind them. He glanced over at her, then nodded toward whatever he’d been looking at. Novikke stared into the blackness beneath the trees.
She didn’t see it until it moved out from under the trees and into the moonlight. It was a tall, dark shape on four legs. A deer.
Its coat was a shade of blue-violet-black and dotted with silver in an imitation of stars, with matching black antlers. The coloring was remarkably like the night elves’ night-colored skin and hair. It was beautifully alien.
It turned and wandered back into the darkness. Novikke gave Aruna an impressed look. The corner of his lips quirked up.
She started to look away again, but she found herself studying the curves and angles of his face, the unnatural luminescent blue of his eyes, the river of black that was his hair. Before, she’d been too afraid to look closely. Her eyes darted to his mouth. She’d heard once that night elves had sharp teeth like wolves. Now she knew that was an exaggeration. She’d seen plenty of Zaiur’s teeth, and they’d looked normal enough.
It took her a moment to notice that he wasn’t looking away either. That realization made the hairs on her neck stand on end. She frowned and averted her eyes. Instead, she looked past him, into the valley.
She froze, staring. She could see a light in the distance, on an old road. A torch, which night elves would never need. The valley must have been outside the boundary of Kuda Varai.
Surrounding the torch was a small group, just tiny dots from so far away. Human travelers. Perhaps even members of the army out on patrol. They were within shouting range. If she called to them, would they come to investigate?
Aruna had turned away, not looking at the road, but the torchlight would catch his attention soon enough. Novikke didn’t have long to act. She edged toward the valley.
Maybe she wouldn’t have had the courage to do it if Zaiur had been there. But Aruna? She was beginning to wonder if he wouldn’t have the guts to kill her.
She took a breath.
“Help!” she shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. She ran as she spoke, putting as much distance between Aruna and herself as she could. She raised her bound arms despite the pain that shot through her shoulder, thinking maybe she could silhouette herself against the sky enough to be seen. “I’m a soldier in the Queen’s Army! I’ve been taken prisoner! Send help!”
Her shouts echoed across the valley. She had enough time to see that the group had stopped moving and were looking in her direction, and then Aruna tackled her.
They fell to the hard ground. She took the impact with her hands and, unfortunately, her chin. Aruna landed heavily on her legs and quickly climbed up her body before she could shake him off. The full weight of him collapsed over her as she flailed under him. Pain stabbed through her arm and shoulder and all the way into her neck and back, and she groaned.
“Hel—”
His hand clamped over her mouth. She growled into it. He was hissing something harsh and rapid at her. His tone alone made the words’ meaning clear enough. She tried to snarl something back at him through his hand, which came out as a muffled groan. She wriggled and kicked furiously, which did nothing but make her shoulder hurt more.
Amid her thrashing she became vaguely aware of something hard at his hip level pressing into her backside. And then, having noticed it and realized what it was, she became very aware of it.
Shocked, she stopped moving. They both went still, with only their hard breaths moving them. She was first struck with indignation and then, bizarrely, curiosity.
She became very cognizant of the feel of his fingers on her face. His chest heaved against her back. His thigh pressed between her legs. His breath was on her hair.
His holds didn’t aim to hurt like Zaiur’s did. For a man keeping her against her will, his hands were surprisingly cautious. Inexplicably, his presence became reminiscent of something else entirely, something she hadn’t had with anyone in a long time.
A sharp, empty feeling had settled in the pit of her stomach. She was uncomfortably torn between wanting to throw him off and wanting him to grind against her.
What an absolutely absurd thought.
The entire moment lasted only a few seconds. Aruna hurriedly shifted sideways so that his hips weren’t directly touching her—which she found pointlessly considerate for someone keeping her prisoner and escorting her to her inevitable execution.
The group of humans below had resumed moving. They were not coming toward her. If anything, they were moving away faster now. Novikke went limp and rested her head on the ground.
Aruna held her for several more minutes, until the torch was out of sight. Then, with an annoyed huff, he got up, dusting off his hands.
Novikke was tempted to just lie there. She couldn’t summon the motivation to continue. She shot the night elf a hateful look.
But then he nudged her foot with his boot, snapping something that sounded like chastising, and reluctantly she got up to follow him along the ridge.
◆◆◆
They stopped for the day in the shadowy part of a rocky clearing as the sky was turning a garish pink with the approaching sunrise.
Aruna made a fire but didn’t cook anything on it. Novikke took the food and water he handed her without looking at him. He was trying not to look at her too, as far as she could tell from her peripheral vision.
She wondered how the elves managed to make such strong fires with the forest’s wood—wood that never burned right when humans tried. Maybe it only burned for the right people.
Once they’d stopped walking, the cold had seeped into her skin. She sat close to the fire, despite the sparks it threw out. They ate in silence which, after what had happened earlier, felt significantly less comfortable than it had at the beginning of the night.
As Novikke was finishing the last of one of those gray chunks of dry bread, Aruna suddenly got up. Novikke’s eyes snapped up to follow him. He picked up a charred stick from the edge of the fire and was using it to scratch something onto the vertical face of a large, flat rock.
When he’d finished, he stood back and looked at Novikke, nodding toward the markings he’d made with the blackened wood. Novikke squinted at it.
“Dreioni?” he’d written, in the Dreioni language.
It was an ancient trade language that had no spoken component.
Once, it had been widely understood throughout the continent, though it was rarely used these days since everyone in nearby countries spoke Ardanian or Ysuran. She’d learned it when she was young and then seldom used it, like most people. She hadn’t thought to use it to solve their communication problems until now.
She nodded. He started writing again.
“It just happens sometimes,” he wrote, and turned to look at her.
She read it several times to make sure she’d read it correctly, and still didn’t understand. She shrugged at him.
He looked uncomfortable, and his hand hovered in front of the stone in indecision as he thought of what to write next.
“It was because of the touching. Not because of—” His hand paused as he searched for a word. “Not because of violence.”
She stared at him, tired. That was what he was worried about? “Why do you care what I think?” she asked.
He held out the burnt stick and gestured to the rock.
She got up and took the stick from him. She drew the unfamiliar shapes slowly because of her tied hands and sore shoulder.
“Let me go,” she wrote, passive aggressive in her sidestepping of his almost-apology. She glared at him, waiting.
He just gave her an impatient look—suddenly the serious one again. Novikke raised the stick again and scratched quickly, distorting shapes in her angry rush. “Not a spy,” she wrote, and underlined it.
He glowered. It was only then, when his hatred showed on his face again like it had the day they’d met, that Novikke realized he’d begun to look at her in an almost kind way over the past day.
She tensed when he reached toward her. He stopped and held out his upturned hand instead of touching her. She placed the stick in his hand.
“Ardanian army,” he wrote next to her writing.
“I didn’t do anything. Not a fighter. Not a scout.”
Looking unmoved, he pointed to the word “Ardanian” again.
“We didn’t hurt you,” Novikke wrote.
Now he looked insulted. He reached into his jacket and produced a folded paper with a broken wax seal across the front—one of the letters she’d been carrying when they found her. He held it up accusingly, as if it were a bloody murder weapon.
Novikke stared at it. She still didn’t know what information the letter contained. She moved to take it from his hand, and he jerked it out of her reach. She frowned and turned to the rock again.
“What does it say?” she wrote.
He hesitated, as if trying to decide whether she was deceiving him, then unfolded the paper and held it up for her to read at a careful distance away. She lifted her mage torch near it and scanned the inked writing.
On the first day of the harvest… at the west end of the forest along… force of at least one hundred… will lead them into Kuda Varai… expect strong resistance from the night elves… establish a base within the forest…
Her eyes glazed in shock as she read it. Ardani was invading Kuda Varai.
She looked at him with less righteous anger now. He was watching her closely.
He held out his hand for the stick. She handed it to him, still dazed.
“Ardanians attacked an outpost and a village. Twelve days ago. People wearing the same colors you wear.”
That couldn’t be right.
But why would he lie?
She wasn’t kept abreast of every movement the army made. Those things were above her head, far out of her control. But now, with Aruna looking at her like this and holding that letter in his hand, guilt and shame swam in her chest, as if she were the one responsible for it.
It was an act of war. There had always been small skirmishes between the Varai and Ardanians, but not like this. Not a full assault on the other’s territory. She supposed Aruna and Zaiur had been perfectly in the right when they’d stopped the wagon on the road.
The war between Ardani and Ysura had undoubtedly caused difficulties for Kuda Varai. The forest was geographically caught between them, with Ysura to the west and Ardani to the east. But now, Kuda Varai was being forcefully drawn into the war itself.
“I didn’t know,” she wrote. Aruna seemed to relax a fraction.
She wondered if anyone he’d known had died. There was another uncomfortable clench of guilt in her chest. She put the tip of the stick to the stone, meaning to write I’m sorry, but stopped. Then she started to write Thank you for helping me, and stopped again, sighing.
“Irresponsible not to keep a panacea with you,” she wrote instead, glancing at his freshly scarred arm.
“Had one. Gave it to you when Zaiur knocked you out.” He looked at her for a moment, then added, “You were bleeding a lot.”
She lifted her eyebrows, alarmed to find out that she had been so badly injured and hadn’t even known it. And she was surprised that he’d gone out of his way to help her—again. She might have felt grateful if she’d thought he’d done it for any reason other than to make sure she stayed alive long enough to be interrogated.
She tossed the stick to the ground and returned to her spot by the fire.
Before they slept, Aruna unbuckled his belt, looped it through Novikke’s tied arms, and re-buckled it around his waist on the side opposite her—a security measure that she found annoying but didn’t complain about. She couldn’t exactly claim that she wouldn’t try to run.
He settled on his back and she curled up on her side with her arms stretched toward him. After a beat, he sat up again, unsheathed the sword and knife at his belt, and tossed them out of reach. He shot her a warning look.
“Wasn’t going to do that,” Novikke said, closing her eyes. “I’m a runner, not a fighter.”
“Mm,” Aruna hummed with a suspicious tone. He settled again, stiffly. She wondered if he felt as uncomfortable with the arrangement as she did.
An arm’s length from him still felt very close. Her hands were pressed against his side. She could feel him move when he breathed.
The more she tried not to think about what had happened earlier that night, the more persistent the memory grew.
◆◆◆
They didn’t speak for most of the next evening. Novikke was sullen and quiet, and so was Aruna. She watched his back as they walked. The back of him was becoming very familiar by then. She’d memorized the shape of his pack, the number of ties on it and the knots he’d used to secure them. She’d watched the way he walked—very straight and upright but fluid—and could have recognized him by that movement alone.
Elves had a different way of moving than humans did. You could tell one from a human just by watching them in motion for a while. They had a natural grace that humans rarely had. She would have said it was the product of cultural influence, but even elves who’d lived in Ardani all their lives had it. She guessed that their bodies were just built differently.
Watching him made her feel loud and clumsy by comparison.
She wondered how long it had been since he’d been intimate with anyone. In Ardani, scouts could be out for weeks at a time. Months even, depending on your position. She didn’t even want to think about how long it had been for herself. Her work didn’t leave a lot of time for socializing.
She rubbed her face in exasperation. Why was she thinking about things like that?
He shot a glance at her over his shoulder. Probably making sure she wasn’t creeping up behind him to smash a rock over his head.
The forest was bigger than she’d realized. They kept walking and there kept being only trees as far as the eye could see.
The deeper into the wood they went, the darker and stranger the nights seemed to grow. At first she thought she was imagining it. But then she began to notice other things, too.
Occasionally she would see flashes of motion in the dark—black shapes that moved like slithery, creeping animals, melding with shadow in a way that wasn’t quite natural. Some of them had glowing spots on them that marked their path as they ran. Most of them were small enough that they made little noi
se and skittered by without stopping. Aruna paid them no mind, which put Novikke at ease.
Several times now, they’d passed thick patches of ethereal black fog. It swirled without any wind, as if it was alive, shimmering when the moonlight hit it right. She had an inexplicable desire to wade into it, like it was beckoning her.
Once, she worked up the courage to approach a patch of it. Aruna sputtered something panicked-sounding and grabbed her arm before she could touch it. He shook his head at her. Novikke’s eyebrows went up. She quickly retreated from the strange fog, which suddenly looked a lot more ominous.
Halfway through the night, Aruna stopped short. Novikke stopped behind him and watched him slowly pivot, scanning the trees with eyes that shone through the dark. She realized that the forest had gone silent. The insects and birds had stopped their calls, and nothing rustled in the bushes.
Night Elves of Ardani: Book One: Captive Page 4