Her eyes roved over the outlines of the muscles of his chest and abdomen, down to the V at his hips and down long, athletic legs, then back up to the angles of his shoulders and jaw and the curve of his lips and to his bright eyes.
By the Five.
Why did he have to be so attractive? Why couldn’t he have been old? Why couldn’t he have been cruel? It would make it so much easier to dislike him.
He gave a tiny, half-hearted smile that seemed almost apologetic. She realized she was still tense, and he must have seen it. Maybe he hadn’t noticed her leering.
She noticed that his eyes did not wander from her face. She wondered if that was because he was purposely trying not to look, or if she just wasn’t interesting enough to bother looking at.
She had less to offer than he did in that area. She was taller than average, with a face that was more masculine than was popular, and a body built from traveling long distances on foot and by horse, meaning that she had neither the curves nor toned strength that men might find interesting. And she had a very boring combination of light, freckled skin and dirt-colored hair, though she supposed it was possible that elves might find that exotic rather than plain.
She realized he was holding something small in one hand. A tiny bottle. He held it out to her and tapped his shoulder.
She took the bottle. It was dark glass, with no label, but watery liquid sloshed inside. Aruna made another motion of rubbing his shoulder.
Novikke uncorked the bottle, and instantly a noxious smell like alcohol and seawater met her nose. She jerked it away from herself, making a face. “What is this?”
He looked amused.
She looked at the bottle uncertainly, then went to dump it onto her shoulder.
“Ah—!” He quickly waved his hands to stop her. After a moment, he held out a hand as if to take the bottle back, and patted his other hand to his chest.
She stiffened. Was she interpreting that gesture correctly?
Did she want him touching her?
She didn’t give it back right away. She stole another glance at his body, half-lit in the yellow firelight—all smooth dark skin and willowy limbs. He had the kind of natural grace and narrow strength that all elves seemed to share. Night elves might have been savage and spiteful, but no one could say they were not beautiful.
She let out a breath through her nose.
Why not? What more did she have to lose, anyway?
She handed the bottle back to him, and set her eyes on the fire instead of on him.
He knelt beside her slowly, as if afraid of scaring her away. He pressed a fingertip to the mouth of the bottle and tipped out a few drops. Then, in a quick stroke, he swept the liquid across the top of her shoulder.
She flinched, gasping. It felt like ice and burning at once. But after a few seconds, it sank into her skin, and then it felt like melting ice and then just like wet, and her skin became tingly and slightly numb.
Aruna stopped long enough for her to recover, then raised his eyebrows, as if asking whether he could continue. She gave a nod.
He dispensed more of the liquid onto his fingers and ran it along her shoulder, covering more skin this time. It hurt less now that she was expecting it. His touch grew firmer, pressing the icy sensation into her. The solution left an oily residue on her skin. After a while, the pain in her shoulder dulled. She closed her eyes.
Aruna’s movements became less tentative. He rubbed the solution slowly over, behind, and under her shoulder and even into the side of her back. It was the first pleasant sensation she’d felt in days. She held her breath when his fingers brushed the side of her chest and grazed over her collarbone.
His hands were warm, firm, slick. Novikke found herself imagining him putting his hands on other parts of her body, and that thought almost made her laugh aloud in disbelief. How, in the course of only a few days, had she gone from hating and fearing him so much to voluntarily being nearly naked with him? The forest was making her lose her mind, probably.
He brushed her hair away to reach the base of her neck. Novikke felt goosebumps forming under his fingers. His hand moved upward, his thumb grazing over the side of her neck, in something very much like a caress.
She looked up at him. He stopped moving, as if he’d only then realized what he was doing.
Maybe he didn’t find her so uninteresting to look at, after all.
What had happened the previous night could be excused as a natural, involuntary reaction that had nothing to do with her specifically. But this?
He abruptly got up, stoppered the bottle, and returned to the other side of the fire.
The fire crackled between them, filling the stiff silence. Her arm had stopped hurting.
Novikke rested her head on her knees, letting the fire bake her damp hair. Sometimes she forgot the reality of what was currently happening to her. The daily struggles of traveling—climbing and getting hungry and getting tired and fighting monsters and swimming for her life—distracted her enough to briefly forget why they were here.
She was here because she was a prisoner. Because he was taking her to an execution.
Aruna showed no signs of wanting to sleep yet. It was still too cold, and it would take time for their clothes and bedding to dry.
She got up, picked up a stick, and walked over to Aruna’s side of the fire. He looked at the stick in her hand, then arched a suspicious eyebrow at her. It was big enough that it could have been mistaken for a weapon, she supposed, albeit a poor one.
Ignoring the look, she glanced around until she found a patch of dirt to write in.
“Pain is gone. Thank you,” she wrote.
He looked down at the words, then nodded absently.
Novikke twirled the stick in her fingers as she thought, then wrote again. “I’m not a spy, or a fighter, but I wanted to be.” She looked up to see if he was still watching. He was. She added, “They wouldn’t let me.”
She’d expected him to tire of the dialogue before it had even begun, but he looked curious. He took the stick from her.
“Ardanians don’t allow women to fight,” he wrote.
His information was outdated, but not by that long. “They do, as of forty or so years ago.”
He rolled his eyes. Novikke had heard that when their city, Vondh Rav, was first founded, it was entirely female-ruled. She did not know if that practice was still in place, but about half of their fighters were female, from what she’d heard. It seemed that no part of society was off-limits to Varai women.
“That thing that happened to me at the river—” she wrote, then sheepishly glanced up at him to see if he took her meaning. “And back on the road,” she added. “It happens often.”
She hesitated. She didn’t know how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t take hours to write. Aruna watched her, one eyebrow lifted.
They’d run out of room, so she groomed the dirt into a smooth plane again before starting anew. “I have a head sickness. Since I was a teenager. I get so afraid that I can’t think or move.”
When she was younger, she’d never have admitted it if she could help it. She’d lost some of her shame over time. It was just the way she was. There was no point in pretending otherwise.
“When I joined the army, I tried to hide it. I failed. They said I wasn’t fit to fight.”
Aruna looked at the words and frowned in a way that she couldn’t quite interpret. He looked up at her and shrugged as if to ask, Why tell me this?
She was telling him because she thought that sane, honest people were likely to have a harder time killing someone they knew. And Aruna appeared sane and honest to her, for a night elf. The more he knew about her, the more he’d be forced to think of her as a real person.
“Why did you want to be a soldier so badly?” he wrote. Novikke sensed judgement in the question. It had been so long that it took her a moment to remember why she’d wanted to join the army in the first place.
“I wanted to help people.”
She looked at the word
s for a few seconds, then scoffed softly. It sounded stupid when she wrote it down for someone else to see. And it sounded stupid when she said it to a night elf, who undoubtedly did not see Ardanian forces as helpful. She watched for his reaction, but she couldn’t tell what he thought of what she’d written.
“My parents were both fighters with the army,” she wrote. “That was before the war with Ysura. Back then, they mostly did things like chasing down brigands and werewolves.”
“Have you helped people?” he wrote. “Or have you only hurt people?”
He certainly knew how to cut to the quick. “I’m not important enough to make a difference one way or another,” she wrote bitterly.
They’d run out of space to write again, and the time it took to write was wearing on her. She dropped the stick. This time, as she stood, she caught him looking sideways at her, tracing her bare skin with his eyes. When she met his gaze, he cleared his throat and looked away. Her first reaction was to feel more pleased than was practical or proper. And then she came to her senses and just felt frustrated again.
As she rounded the fire back to her place opposite him, her eyes lingered on his weapons, still sheathed on his belt on the ground at his side. It was the first time she’d seen them not attached to him.
Still too close to him for her to reach them before he did, though.
She looked up and realized he was watching her watching the blades. His eyes narrowed at her. She narrowed hers back.
Chapter 5
The next night, as morning was approaching again, Aruna stopped in the middle of the path so suddenly that Novikke almost ran into him.
He’d gone very still. Novikke edged closer to him, scanning the trees. There wasn’t much in these woods that worried him. If he was concerned, there was a good reason for it.
Then she heard it. Distant footsteps crunching over leaves. A soft voice somewhere far off.
They exchanged a glance. She knew he was thinking the same thing she was. He could tell the people weren’t night elves, and therefore, they might be someone who would come to Novikke’s aid.
He gave have a subtle shake of his head, staring her down.
She was about to shout to them when she saw movement through the trees fifty paces from them. She spotted a figure, which was soon joined by another, then another. There was a whole band of them. She and Aruna both squinted into the distance. In the dim light of morning, not yet bright and no longer dark, their eyesight was about equal.
The figures were tall, with pale amber skin, wearing armor of black leather, red cloth, and gold-tinted metal. One of them spoke, and Novikke recognized the Ysuran language.
She exchanged another look with Aruna. The sun elves and night elves had been at odds for as long as time could recall. But Ysurans had no love for Ardanians either, especially since the war had begun.
It was more than likely that they’d kill both of them on sight.
Novikke widened her eyes at Aruna, silently asking what they should do. It was too late to run. The sun elves would hear them and give chase.
Aruna took her wrist and pulled her behind a tree with him, pushing her back against it as if trying to make her sink into the bark. It wouldn’t do any good. The voices were coming closer. There was no way they could avoid notice. They’d both have fireballs in their backs in seconds.
But then something happened. She felt a tingle of something unnatural and uncomfortable seeping through her skin. She’d felt it before, on rare occasions. Magic.
He was casting a spell on her. Instinctively she wanted to resist, but she had no magic of her own with which to fight it. She looked up at Aruna, aghast. His wide eyes pleaded with her, and her suspicion ebbed.
His hand was still on her wrist—the point of contact through which he was extending the spell to her. They both became dark and transparent and ephemeral, like they were made of shadow.
She’d heard stories of night elves transforming their bodies into darkness itself, and she had thought it an exaggeration. It was their innate magic, she realized. Like the sun elves’ fire magic and the Ashara’s empathic abilities.
The spell enveloped them, blending them with the shadow of the tree, as the sun elves’s footsteps approached.
“Ysura,” Novikke mouthed silently, giving Aruna a bitterly smug look. He had the decency to look a little contrite. The person who’d attacked them by the river had been one of the Ysurans. What they were doing in Kuda Varai in the first place was a mystery, but they could not have been up to any good.
Very close, a voice spoke. Aruna leaned close to her, trying to make the two of them as small as possible. Novikke could feel his chest rise and fall against hers.
One of the sun elves passed by ten paces from them, picking her way through the brush with confident, graceful steps. She, like Novikke, was oblivious to the night elves’ secret paths through the forest, so she crossed through branches and bushes instead of zigzagging between them.
Aruna watched the approaching group on the other side of the tree, over Novikke’s shoulder. In the dawn light, Novikke could still see his eyes reflecting subtle rings of light. Her heart leapt in alarm. Could they see the flash of his eyes through the spell?
She put her hands on either side of his face and gently turned his head toward her. His gaze flicked from the forest back to her.
She didn’t know how to explain to him what she was thinking. She gave a slight shake of her head. He blinked at her. He didn’t try to break her hold.
Another figure passed, and Aruna leaned closer. His body pressed against her, pinning her against the tree. Their faces were on each other’s shoulders. She heard him swallow. At some point her hands had moved up and gripped handfuls of his shirt.
She didn’t have the willpower to hate the arousal that spread through her. Morbidly curious, she tilted her head, bringing her cheek just barely into contact with his.
Aruna stiffened. He risked backing a half step away. He was carefully avoiding her eyes.
Without thinking, Novikke grabbed his belt and pulled him against her again. He looked down at her, surprise and offense and interest playing on his features. She challenged his gaze with her own. He didn’t pull away again.
A figure appeared no more than a step from them. They both went as still as statues, not breathing. The figure, a tall man with predatory yellow eyes that reminded Novikke of a cat’s, paused beside their tree. He glanced in their direction, and Novikke’s heart shuddered.
But the man’s gaze did not quite fall on them. He was looking past them, into the forest beyond. He rested a hand on the hilt of the sword at his hip, glaring into the morning light.
One of the others called, and the man turned to respond with a string of quick, flowing syllables. It felt startlingly loud from this close. Finally the man kept walking, leaving Novikke and Aruna alone again.
Novikke exhaled softly. Aruna leaned forward to let his head rest against the bark beside her. His breath puffed against her neck.
Her heart raced. She was keenly aware of the warmth and heaviness of him against her, even when he was completely still. It occurred to her that fear and arousal did not feel so different to the body. It was disturbingly easy to transition from one to the other. And maybe the feeling of narrowly avoiding death was making her crave earthly comforts a little more desperately than usual.
The man with the sword seemed to have been the last of the Ysurans. The footsteps and voices faded and disappeared. Novikke sagged against the tree.
Aruna waited until long after they’d left before he finally lifted his head. He looked over his shoulder in the direction the elves had gone. He took a step back from Novikke, and they both became solid again as his spell broke.
He gave her a look. There was a moment that stretched for a long time, and the air between them felt thick and heavy. She waited, because it felt like something big was on the verge of happening.
But then he turned away, and the moment was gone. Novikke pushed he
r fallen hair behind her ears.
Aruna knelt over a patch of dirt. He paused, then started carving into it with a stone. “Shouldn’t have shouted at you,” he wrote.
Frowning, she picked through possible responses, then bent and took the stone.
“I think you can do whatever you want to me, can’t you? I’m your prisoner,” she wrote, with calculated venom.
He gave her a disapproving look, like he was offended by having his evils pointed out. Novikke tossed the stone to the ground and walked onward.
◆◆◆
She was taken by surprise when, the next night, they came upon a night elf outpost in the woods.
Night Elves of Ardani: Book One: Captive Page 6