Page 204 of Season Warriors & Wolves

“Chalk the streets?”

“Yeah.” She looked so amazed at the opportunity, her eyes gleaming as she searched for space to draw on.

I took a front row seat on a city bench, watching her atrocious skills at work. Mushy figures, stick figures, loads of stars and moons. Once she was done, she stood up, hands on her hips and fully satisfied with her work. “Perfect.”

“That’s absolutely horrendous.”

She hit me precisely in the middle of my forehead with a chalk. “It’s Dolunay,” she said, pointing to the clip on her head—the one I’d gotten her. “I never got to see it this year. You promised to take me. I think it would look a bit like this, would it not? Loads of stars, people walking the streets searching for sweets, and things of the sort.”

Something heavy settled on top of my chest, like a weight pinning my lungs down. When had I let myself get so attached to another that would leave me as well?

I grabbed the chalks from her hand, pushing her to sit down and watch. I had not drawn anything in ages, didn’t know if I even could still, but I tried. Tried my best at recalling a Dolunay where I’d not been drunk enough to forget. I wanted her to see whatever she wanted to see. The whole world if she asked.

It was almost past sunset when I finished. The lack of daylight had not dimmed the bright colours of the chalk at all, only given them more life. When I moved back, there was horror crawling over me. Some relief there, too.

“Wow,” Snow murmured, her mouth agape while she looked at what I’d drawn. “Much better than what I’d envisioned. Thank you, Mal.” She hopped from one drawing to the other, crouching down so she could see the details, trailing a finger over them and admiring.

“Tell Kilian.”

Her head snapped to me. “You know I can’t.”

My chest, the pain, I couldn’t bear all she had told me on my own. I needed my brother…I needed him to fix this for me again. “To hells, Snow, to hells with it all.”

Her chin quivered, eyes glazing over. “Absolutely not, never.”

“Grey was right. Even if we win, he will not…he cannot live without you, Snow. I know. I know that is the truth.”

“He will have you. Our family. All of it. He will have to. Force him if you must. You gave me your word, Mal, please.”

My head was pounding. Tugging and pulling at my hair did not grant me any relief at all. The fucking thoughts were so loud, crowding other each other. Every emotion in the distance grew so close. Of a child screaming, a man coughing from sickness, a happy mother singing her baby to sleep. It was all so much.

“I need you, Mal.”

Like that, they disappeared. “Fight it. I’ll fight it with you. You want me to beg again? I’ll beg again for you.”

Her face fell, stray tears chasing down her face. I couldn’t even stop those. “Every night when I dream it, I see a small detail change. So minute you would think there was no change at all. The screams sometimes call my name, sometimes they call yours or Thora’s. Sometimes I’m burning and sometimes you or Thora or Cai or Nia or Eren or…he is burning instead of me. You know when that change happens? After every time I go to bed convincing myself that I will wake up the next day and erase it. They are taunting me, Mal.”

I caught her tears again. Her pain was hidden from me, yet I could feel it so intensely from that one desperate way she said my name. “Alright. Alright, Snow.”

“Promise me you will not let your brother do anything that I don’t want him to do.”

“I promise.”

Chapter forty-one

White Knight to F5

Nia

It was growing colder in Aru, Hanaians had been in the fields trying to nourish their crops with heat all day, yet their queen’s main intentions at the moment were to just be angry at me. Straight after I returned from Drava, she’d abandoned whatever duty at hand and had called for me to join her at her private training grounds.

I swung at her again after ducking and evading every attack she’d brought my way. And as always, she caught me, and this time she wrapped a hand around my jaw and backed me to the court wall. “Ahana, I don’t want to hurt you, but if it had been someone else—”

“No one can get this close to my heart, Mor. You wanted me to sweat out an apology, the least I can do is let you make me sweat since I will not be making that apology. You forget who I am. What I am. It was that once, Mor, just that once. Why won’t you have a little more faith in me?”

She rested her forehead against mine and let out a long sigh. “You know what plagues my thoughts?”

“If only. Perhaps we would have little of these disagreements.”