Page 150 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“You make me happy. Do I make you miserable?”

She made me feel everything. A myriad of colours. Some which I’d been so terrified of ever feeling.

“Taking you a while to answer there, mister fox,” she said, playing with my shirt’s buttons.

“It has been a secret for so long that I am afraid to say it out loud.”

Stepping even closer, she got to her tiptoes and lifted her ear to me, waiting for me to say it.

My lips brushed her ear as I whispered low, “You make me so happy, Thora Isa Krigborn.”

Chapter thirty-four

Orange Alstroemerias

Thora

There was something wrong with my magic despite all my effort to restore my previous control to it. Though part of it had managed to come through, it felt all over the place. I felt all over the place.

Pulling back on the white hood, I looked around at the quiet village that had just been attacked again a second night in a row, searching for the one Isline soldier who’d managed to escape my attention while I had dealt with the rest.

“You should've been done by now,” Elias hissed, running to me and looking back at the approaching Isjordian soldiers.

“I missed one.”

He blinked. “You…missed one?”

Frantically, I nodded. “What do I do?”

“Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

He sighed. “Go. I’ll deal with it. They can’t have gone far in this snow by foot alone.”

Gathering the ends of my snow-soaked cloak, I headed for the forest by the village where my ice dragon awaited.

Something broke through the wind through the trees and I leaned back, avoiding the dagger thrown at me by a hair.

I scrunched my nose and sighed, thankful for it still being there. Once I counted all my other limbs, I felt for the warmth of blood hiding around the cold forest, listening for its flow until my senses could pick up on its vibrations. Just before I tried to squeeze every drop of my magic and reach to grasp control of them, another dagger flew my way the opposite of where they were hiding.

I felt its sting before I saw it come for me.

There were two—I’d missed two of them.

The hells was wrong with me.

The dagger had cut through the thick white robe and grazed my forearm. It didn’t take long for the cloak fabric to turn red from the blood. Which would mean the both of them would know that I was human enough to bleed.

Before I could turn them both into living breathing puppets, Malik faded before me, his attention around the forest.

Like they had been called upon, both Isline soldiers walked themselves out of hiding, frozen stiff under Malik’s command. Their heads twisted at an odd angle until they cracked, and their bodies thudded to the ground—dead.

“How did you know where I was?” I asked, putting a hand to my heart, thankful.

“Never take the damn necklace off.”

“Oh,” I said, reaching to touch the yellow stone and wincing when the wound on my arm rubbed against the cloak.