Page 41 of Daughter of No Worlds

“I told you that slamming your head against the wall wouldn’t work,” Max said.

My head sure felt like it had been slammed againstsomething.It throbbed so intensely that the colors of my vision grew brighter and dimmer with every rhythmic beat of pain. I reached to my side, my fingers groping in the dirt, closing gently around something hard.

“It didn’t?” I smiled at him as I opened my fingers to reveal a glass flower — every petal different, perfectly imperfect, an exact replica.

I’d never tasted anything sweeter than the quiet, muted surprise on Max’s face as he took the flower from me, turning it around in his fingers.

“Good,” he said, finally. There was a hint of a question mark at the end, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

I let my throbbing head fall back into the grass, allowing the flowers to hide my grin. Gods, I forgot how wonderful it felt to exceed expectations.

Chapter Thirteen

The fish burned my throat.

I’d never really had much of a home, so I, perhaps naively, thought I would be immune to homesickness. Not true, it turned out. There were many things I missed about Threll, even about the Mikov estate, the only home I had known for my adult life. Near the top of that list was food that didn’t hurt to eat. Arans, apparently, confused “taste” with “pain.” Or at least, Max did.

He kept turning that glass flower around and around in his fingers as I ate. To my delight, he had nothing bad to say about it.

“Now you just have to learn how to do that in seconds instead of hours.”

“I will,” I replied, even though the prospect of it seemed dizzily daunting. “We will continue after eating.”

I said this very casually, even though my stomach clenched at the thought. The floor felt like it was shifting beneath my feet, like I was back on that wretched boat with my infected back.

Max scoffed. “Like hell we will. You need at least a few hours to rest.”

“I feel fine.”

Untrue. But I had no time for rest. And besides, the thought of lying there with nothing to occupy myself but my thoughts seemed far more intimidating than forcing myself through exhaustion.

Max gave me a narrowed stare that pierced my lie. “You pushed yourself too hard. Wielding expends a lot of energy, and you’ve been doing it nonstop for the last twenty hours.”

“It worked.”

“This time. You won’t always be so lucky.” He shifted in his chair, opening his mouth as if he were about to speak. But before he could, the front door swung open and Sammerin stood there.

“Thank you, as always, for knocking. So very polite.” Max cast a glance over his shoulder, though Sammerin offered no response other than a smirk and a delicate shrug. “Did you bring our favorite apprentice-sized ball of destruction? Because if so, he’s not allowed in the house. Or the garden. I suppose he can sit very very still in a corner somewhere, touching nothing.”

“Moth is visiting his mother.” Sammerin slid into the chair beside Max. “Thank the Ascended.”

“And you choose to spend your precious freedom with us? How sweet.”

“Limited freedom. I have a client soon.” Sammerin’s gaze settled on me, pausing for a moment. I wondered if he heard it too — the “us.” “How are you, Tisaanah? You look a bit—”

“I’m fine,” I replied, at the exact same time that Max said, “She spent all night making this.”

He handed Sammerin my glass flower, who examined it thoughtfully before glancing from Max to me. “Good work.”

“Thank you,” I said, at the exact same time that Max remarked, “It’s acceptable.”

“Hm.” Sammerin looked from me, to Max, back to me. I was not typically one to be self-conscious, but I had to resist the urge to squirm beneath the assessing weight of his gaze.

“Client?” I asked.

“Sammerin is a healer,” Max said. Frankly, it was a relief to hear that answering for others was not just something he did to me.

“Like Willa?”

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