Page 119 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

She slapped her other hand over her mouth, eyes wide on my torso where a second arrow was edged in my flesh. The metal sheath had turned a stained bronze. “It’s laced with poison.”

“Blood poison,” I said, snapping the shaft in half. “They have a Crafter. It was a trap. Iskyla knew you’d retaliate. She wanted Isjordians to know you walked to her lands willingly seeking a fight. One she wants and thinks you will lose. If she killed you here today, she would have killed you as an invader, a threat. She’d be a queen slayer, not a usurper.”

“And I gave her just what she wanted.”

“Not the time to go all pessimistic on me.”

Something flashed in her eyes—not metaphorically. “Malik–”

I cupped her face, tilting her head to me. Then I saw it clearly.

Her eyes.

They had changed.

Chapter twenty-eight

Red Tiger Lily

Thora

I couldn't breathe. Not watching him bleed against my hand. Not knowing I’d become just what I hated. Everything was blurring. The air grew piercing cold, and the pouring snow grew sharp.

He cupped my face, frowning down at me. “Thora.” His thumbs smoothed under my eyes and his chest rose faster and faster. “Your eyes.”

“I need to get you somewhere safe,” I choked out, barely managing to conjure magic.

“Hold tightly,” he breathed, pulling me to him. “I don’t think I can do this more than once.”

“You can’t fade, the Crafter will trace us.”

“Not this time.” Skeletal hands broke through the snow, the dead rising fast, so fast that a shudder travelled down my spine at the taste of death invading the air. “It will throw off the Crafter’s senses. Come.”

The second my hand touched his, our surroundings changed, and he collapsed forward, falling into my arms. “Oh, gods, Malik.”

“Even in death you won’t call me Mal,” he chuckled, trying to straighten himself.

The small village was dead and empty when we stepped through it—so neat and perfect and still as wind tunnelled through the streets and the houses creating eerie tunes. Almost haunted, the shadows cast by a dim sunset crawled up the stony walls to create giants of nightmares.

“There is nothing here,” Malik said as we passed through house after house. “We’re safe.”

“It looks so well kept. How is that possible?”

“It isn’t,” he said, clutching his injured side. “Not in the normal world. Not in the world that moved past gods and their gifts. The magic hovering this part of the realm preserves everything, even long after death.” He pointed his head to a two-floor house with windows and doors still intact. “There. We will rest in that one tonight.”

“No,” I said. “No, we’re almost by the border and you’re injured, we cannot stop, you need a healer.”

He stopped and sighed, casting me a look that made me shift on my feet. “My body can handle it.”

“How do you know?”

He tilted his head back and raised a brow.

Yeah, I knew how.

“Fine,” I said, leading us inside the haunted house of his choice. It was dark, but even in the dark I could tell the room was neat and dustless. Not even a cobweb in sight. “This is getting creepier by the second.”

Malik dropped to a sofa, groaning and breathing heavily as he rested his head back and shut his eyes.