Page 71 of The Daughter of the Scarred Elf

“Did you …?” The question hung in the air. She knew exactly what he meant. He had, after all, been chasing her over a year and a half ago for a murder she had committed. It wasn’t farfetched to imagine she would kill again.

“No.”

“Sijur?”

She didn’t miss the sharpness of his tone. “Yes.”

She thought of Sijur’s excited face, how it had all been an experiment, how little Birgitta’s life meant to him. The display had shown her just how much of a demon Sijur was and just how precarious her own situation was.

She could feel Blár watching her. His gaze was heavy and full of questions, questions she didn’t want to answer immediately. She was still embarrassed that she had subconsciously gone to him when she was feeling vulnerable and scared. How was it that he had gone from her enemy, to a friend, to … a safe place?

Blár rose from his seat silently and went to a dresser on the side of his room. He rummaged through it and came back to her with a wad of bandages in one hand and a jar of green salve in the other. He nodded to her hands as he sat.

“Let me see.”

“It’s fine—” she began.

“No. Let me see.” He placed the bandages and the jar between them and when she didn’t move, he reached for her hand. His skin was frosty to the touch, like pressing against an ice cube. She fell into that touch. Let him probe against the dried blood crusted along the gashes on her palm. The rough calluses of his hands soothed her nerves for some reason.

Blár turned over her hands, inspecting them with a grim expression. His gaze flicked to her. “Did you grab a knife by the blade?”

She nodded mutely.

He sighed. “Kolfinna, what the actual hell were you thinking?”

“You weren’t there,” Kolfinna said with a grimace as the memory resurfaced. “You don’t know what happened.”

He frowned. “Fair enough.”

He grabbed the pitcher of water that sat on his coffee table and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. Wetting it, he tentatively brought it to her hand. He slowly worked on cleaning the wound, occasionally dabbing more water on the bloodied handkerchief, which was slowly becoming more and more rust-colored.

Kolfinna watched the way his blue eyes roved over the cuts. It didn’t matter if he bandaged her up or not because sooner or later, the wounds would heal by themselves. The only reason it was taking so long, she surmised, was because she had used a good sum of her mana already. Since healing was a type of magic, it had to run on something. And she was almost dried up, so she would likely be healed tomorrow or in a few hours once her mana replenished itself.

“These are pretty deep gashes,” Blár said once he had cleaned up all the blood. “You’ll need stitches.”

“I’ll be fine.” She reached for the bandages, but Blár held her hands once more.

“You’re not.”

Exhaustion made the back of her head feel heavy and she slumped deeper into the couch, wanting to slither between the cushions and disappear. “Blár,” she said, her voice coming as a fatigued sigh, “can you just bandage me up and forget about it?”

He went still, those icy eyes embodying a frozen lake as he stared at her. The chill of winter brushed over her skin. “Forget about it? Kolfinna, you came into my room covered in blood. That’s not something I can easily forget.”

Blár unscrewed the jaw of salve and stuck his fingers into the glob-like mixture. “I don’t like seeing you all bloodied up. You hear me? After we’re done here, I’m going to have a word with that eel-skinned toad.” He said a few colorful swear words under his breath, and she could only imagine he was talking about Sijur.

“Eel-skinned toad.” Kolfinna rolled over those words in her mouth with a grin. “I like that. No clue what it actually means, but I like it.”

“I’ve got a lot of words to describe Sijur. A slimy snake being one of them.” His finger brushed against the rune marked on her wrist.

“It’s not that easy,” she said with another long sigh. “Remember, I have to obey him, so I’d rather you not talk to him and stir the pot.”

“Yeah, I remember, but”—Blár continued slathering the salve on her cuts—“maybe I can knock some sense into that worthless?—”

“Blár.” She could already feel a headache slowly budding in the back of her head. “I’d rather you not make my situation more complicated than it already is. I know you’re just trying to help, but … I can’t have Sijur thinking too negatively about me. Or giving me too much thought, either. My position could be worse, especially since I have to obey him. He could have me locked away somewhere, isolated from everyone but him. He could make me”—she shivered, thinking about the way Sijur had stared at Olia and Birgitta like they meant nothing—“I don’t know, do weird things for him. I’d rather keep it this way.”

At least the way things were now, she could still interact with people. She could still train, get stronger, go out into the world on new missions. If Sijur thought she was too complicated to handle … Her freedom might disappear. She hated that he hadthat power over her, but she had given it to him when she sealed their deal.

Kolfinna didn’t have a choice back then, she told herself. The Royal Guards, Hilda, and the king had forced her hand.

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