Page 21 of The Daughter of the Scarred Elf

“These are amazing.” She picked up a flimsy drawing of a gray cat with glaring green eyes and held it up for him. “You’re really talented.”

His cheeks further reddened. “Thank you.”

Kolfinna dropped the sketches on his desk and rubbed the nape of her neck. As much as she enjoyed looking at these sketches, she would rather get to business. It didn’t help thatJoran’s blushing made her uncomfortable. “So …” she started. “What did you want to show me?”

He rose to his feet and crossed the distance to the other door in the room. “It’s in here,” he said as he turned the metal doorknob. He paused and turned to her hesitantly. “Um, please don’t tell anyone about this. I’d rather keep it …”

“A secret.”

He nodded.

His constant submissiveness and quiet nature were still grating on her nerves, and she opened her mouth to ask him if he had any plans of revealing his identity as a fae, but she was silenced when he threw the door open. The room was … plain. Anticlimactically plain.

A mirror took up one side of the small room, covering the entire expanse of that wall, and beside it was a small stool with glass jars and bottles. The floors slanted downward to the center of the room almost unnoticeably, and there were tiny holes in the ceramic tiles. The ceiling had similar holes clustered near the center. Drains? Or maybe something else?

It was then that she noticed the runes etched onto one of the walls. She ventured closer to it.Hot. Warm. Cold.

Kolfinna turned to Joran, who remained in the doorway. “What is this?”

“It’s … um, hard to explain. I made this so it’s easy to take a bath. Except, you’re not taking a bath, it’s more like a … shower of rain?” He quickly pointed to the ceiling and then to the runes. “I constructed it so that it connects to the water supply of the fort and those runes control the water temperature. There’s … a lot that goes into the construction of the pipes and adding runes to make it a continuous cycle of water when running … Anyway, it makes it so that it’s quick and efficient to clean yourself. It’s run with magic.”

She blinked, unable to wrap her mind around it. “You … made this?”

“I got the idea from a book,” he said quickly, waving his hands. “I’m not smart enough to come up with something like this on my own. Apparently, the ancient fae used contraptions like this and similar other inventions to make their lives easier. When the humans took this country back, they destroyed those inventions because they couldn’t use them without the use of rune magic, rendering them useless to the humans … Unless they kept some of the fae around, which some nobles did, but the inventions themselves eventually died off because there was no one to make them and humans—” He clamped his mouth shut and then cleared his throat. “A-Anyway, yes, I made this.”

“How do you turn it on?”

“You supply your mana into the rune.” Joran pointed to the three runes on the wall. “And when you want to turn it off, you touch that rune.” He entered the room and placed a hand on the adjacent wall, where she hadn’t even noticed a rune that readhalt.

The cramped room made her suddenly aware of just how close he was to her, close enough that she could smell pine needles and summer air. In the reflection of the mirror, her pink eyes appeared vibrant against the clash of her white-and-black hair. Next to her, he appeared more fae-like. His green eyes were more vivid and even his burnt gold hair appeared more vibrant. More otherworldly.

He was beautiful, like sunshine.

But that was only his appearance. His personality reminded her of clouds trying to cloak the sunshine.

“Um.” Joran coughed. “You’re free to use it. I’ll be in my room.”

“Oh, I don’t know—” she started, but the thought of trying out a device that her ancestors had used was too tempting, soshe shut her mouth and inspected the walls and the ceilings. It wasn’t often that she would get a chance like this. She vaguely remembered Revna mentioning that fae civilization was more advanced than humans could ever be and that rune magic had been prevalent throughout her time.

“I’d like it if you tried it,” he said. “I … I would love to get your input on it, or if there’s anything I can add to improve it.”

She hid her enthusiasm by jamming her thumbs in the pockets of her pants. “Um, sure. Thank you.”

“The soaps are there.” Joran pointed to the stool with a set of colorful jars of different substances sitting on its warped, wooden surface. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”

He backtracked, his eyes darting from her face, to her figure, to the rest of the room before he quietly shut the door.

Once she was alone, Kolfinna carefully stripped her sweat-drenched clothes off her body and tossed them on the floor. When she was completely naked and her hair was wrenched free from its braid, she placed a hand on thewarmrune and sent a wave of mana into it. A spray of water rained down on her in seconds. She gasped at the unexpectedness of it, but her muscles slowly eased themselves as the warm water rushed over her hair, her sticky skin, and her face.

Her quivering muscles relaxed, the cuts and scrapes and bruises stopped throbbing, and her hair felt less weighed down with sweat and grime. She wanted to fall into a puddle on the floor.

Five minutes must’ve passed while she just stood under the torrent of water before she tried to find the soap. Joran, apparently, wasn’t like a normal person who had a single bar of soap. He had jars of different-colored liquids; some were pink, others dark purple, and one that was strangely a murky swamp color. The pink one smelled like roses, the purple like lavender,and the third she wasn’t even sure what it was, but it smelled pleasant too. Like citrus and moss.

Kolfinna poured the pink liquid into her palms and rubbed her hands together until there was a thick, sudsy layer on her hands. She lathered herself with it, slowly working it through her hair and then the rest of her body. She scrubbed at the cuts and scrapes along her body, at the debris and dust that had collected in her hair, at the rough patches of her skin—she polished herself until she was spotless.

When she finished, she placed her hand on thehaltrune. The water instantly stopped when she activated the rune with her mana. The mirror was cloudy with condensation and without the warmth of the water, Kolfinna shivered.

Placing a hand on the mirror, she wiped at the steamy reflection, her pink eyes bright and her white-black hair soppy against her damp skin. She hesitantly turned her back to the mirror and twisted over her shoulder to glance at her back. Like she had suspected, something was wrong with the scars. Where there should’ve been two large, thick white scars on her upper back beside her spine in two identical cuts, the scars were raised and a blotchy red color, as if she had recently had her wings snipped.

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