Page 23 of The Daughter of the Scarred Elf

“Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.” Kolfinna winced at the harshness of her tone, while he flinched. A mistake, she told herself. She softened her tone. “Err, I’ll see you later then.”

“I’ll fetch you after dinner …” Joran chewed on his lower lip.

Kolfinna nodded, keen on finishing their conversation. “Great, I’ll see you then.” When he opened his mouth to speak, she added, “No need to escort me. I’ll go to my room by myself.”

“O-Okay?—”

She was already heading down the hallway. She had no plans of spending more than a few seconds alone with him.

Kolfinna had expectedSijur’s office to be militaristic but still bedecked in luxury, like with glass chandeliers and intricate paintings of battlefields hanging on the wall, and swords and various weaponry on display. It was what she imagined for the son of the most powerful man in the country. But instead of violent war art and gilded furniture, his walls were full of bookshelves jampacked with books, there were two velvet couches across a snug fireplace, and the room had the woody vanilla scent of old books.

Sijur sat behind his desk, riffling through a thick, yellow-paged book. When he saw Joran and Kolfinna, he rose fromhis seat. “Come in, come in! Kolfinna, I’m hoping your mana replenished during the time you’ve been resting?”

“A bit.” Between the embarrassing bath scene, curling up on her bed in mortification, and having dinner, her mana had refilled itself to the point that she wasn’t nearly dried out, but the day’s exhaustion still persisted.

“Good. Good.” He rounded his desk and came to stand in front of them both. “How are you feeling in terms of your magic?”

“I’m okay.” She could feel Joran burning holes into the side of her face. She hadn’t spoken to him since the bath incident and all he had done was stare at her and wait for her to speak first.

“Do you feel confident in your abilities?”

She had such a strange relationship with her confidence; sometimes it was high, sometimes it was low, but it was mostly all over the place. “I feel all right. I think I’m stronger than most fae.”

“What about your rune magic?”

“I think I’m pretty good at it,” Kolfinna said truthfully. She still had a long way to go, but she didn’t think she was terrible, and the last few times she had used rune magic had good results.

“Good, good.” He clapped her shoulder. “That’s just what I want to hear.”

Kolfinna absentmindedly touched the rune mark on her wrist. At least Sijur seemed interested in how she was doing at the fort. The two days that she was here, he had shown more compassion about her situation than Fenris did the entire five months she was with the Royal Guards.

Despite that … she hadn’t felt uneasy with Fenris like she did with Sijur, and she could still hear Fenris’s warning in the back of her mind.

Fenris also wasn’t this touchy-touchy, which she had been grateful for.

Sijur removed his hand from her shoulder, as if sensing her discomfort, and strolled over to his desk. He leaned against the edge of it and folded his arms over his chest. “I forgot to ask this earlier today, but how is your arm doing?”

“My arm?”

“Yes, your arm,” Sijur said slowly, his gaze flicking to Joran and then back at her. “Didn’t you injure it yesterday?”

Right—the fight with Bjarni, where he had thrown a knife at her forearm, and how it had subsequently healed.

“Oh, that! I’m fine,” she said with a dismissive wave. “It was just a scratch! It looked worse than it actually was. I’m fine, really.” Kolfinna pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and tried to appear nonchalant, but she was sure she was failing as the two men looked at her with raised brows. “A-Anyway, what did you need from me?”

Kolfinna really,reallyhoped Joran hadn’t noticed that her arm was completely healed when he saw her naked. Hopefully—and she couldn’t believe she was even thinking it—he had been too focused on her breasts to notice her arm.

“Right, let’s get to business, then.” Sijur jutted his chin toward the door. “Joran, can you please bring the woman inside?”

Joran’s spine went rigid and for a moment, panic flashed over his face momentarily. It was so short of a second that Kolfinna almost thought she imaged it. But the stiffness of his posture as he jerkily went to the door told her she wasn’t imaging things. He appeared … scared, almost? Uncomfortable?

Kolfinna shifted on her feet and the polished, wooden planks squeaked with the motion.

“So,” she said, “who is Joran bringing?”

“You’ll see.”

Sijur stared out the window overlooking the courtyard below.

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