Page 90 of Kingdom of Ash

Abraxos lifted his head from where it rested atop Narene’s back and looked toward them, as if to say,It took you long enough to figure it out.

“What am I supposed to be watching for, exactly?”

Sitting knee to knee in their tiny tent, the wind howling outside, Manon’s golden eyes narrowed as she peered into Dorian’s face. “My eyes,” he said. “Just tell me if they change color.”

She growled. “This shape-shifting is really a pressing thing to learn?”

“Indulge me,” he purred, and reached inward, his magic flaring.

Brown. You will change from blue to brown.

Liar—he supposed he was a liar for keeping his true reasons from her. He didn’t need Damaris to confirm it.

She might forbid him from going to Morath, but there was another possibility, even worse than that.

That she would insist on going with him.

Manon gave him a look that might have sent a lesser man running. “They’re still blue.”

Gods above, she was beautiful. He wondered when it would stop feeling like a betrayal to think so.

Dorian took a long breath, concentrating again. Ignoring the whispering presence of the two keys in his jacket pocket. “Tell me if it changes at all.”

“It’s that different from your magic?”

Dorian sat back, bracing his arms behind him as he sought the words to explain. “It’s not like other sorts of magic, where it flows through my veins, and half a thought has it changing from ice to flame to water.”

She studied him, head angled in a way he’d witnessed the wyverns doing. Right before they devoured a goat whole. “Which do you like the best?”

An unusually personal question. Even though this past week, thanks to the tent’s relative warmth and privacy, they’d spent hours tangling in the blankets now beneath them.

He’d never had anything like her. He sometimes wondered if she’d never had anything like him, either. He’d seen how often she found her pleasure when he took the reins, when her body writhed beneath his and she lost control entirely.

But the hours in this tent hadn’t yielded any sort of intimacy. Only blessed distraction. For both of them. He was glad of it, he told himself. None of this could end well. For either of them.

“I like the ice best,” Dorian admitted at last, realizing he’d let the silence drip on. “It was the first element that came out of me—I don’t know why.”

“You’re not a cold person.”

He arched a brow. “Is that your professional opinion?”

Manon studied him. “You can descend to those levels when you are angry, when your friends are threatened. But you are not cold, not at heart. I’ve seen men who are, and you are not.”

“Neither are you,” he said a bit quietly.

The wrong thing to say.

Manon stiffened, her chin lifting. “I am one hundred seventeen years old,” she said flatly. “I have spent the majority of that time killing. Don’t convince yourself that the events of the past few months have erased that.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” He doubted anyone had ever spoken to her that baldly—relished that he now did, and kept his throat intact.

She snarled in his face. “You’re a fool if you believe the fact that I am their queen wipes away the truth that I have killed scores of Crochans.”

“That fact will always remain. It’s how you make it count now that matters.”

Make it count.Aelin had said as much back in those initial days after he’d been freed of the collar. He tried not to wonder whether the icy bite of Wyrdstone would soon clamp around his neck once more.

“I am not a softhearted Crochan. I will never be, even if I wear their crown of stars.”

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