Page 101 of A Flame of the Phoenix

“We should find a new place to rest for the night,” she advised.

She couldn’t keep walking with him. It seemed to make him too talkative, and she needed him to stop with his words that felt like a trick to draw things out of her she didn’t want to expose.

“You do look tired,” he commented.

That only made her expression sour more, but his expressions were becoming weighted too. The long weeks at sea had been grueling, and this was their first day on land.

They approached the next inn they found—a slender building wedged down a narrow street, with little to offer inside.

“Are you hungry?” Kyleer asked.

Zaiana swore before admitting, “I don’t have any coin.” Then she regarded his chains. “And Reylan has the key to those.”

“I doubt you planned to release me from them.”

Zaiana didn’t know what compelled her to stop in the hall and reach for one of his wrists, holding the Magestone. She stared at the thick abrasions burning his skin from the material, and yet she was unharmed by it. This was what separated what they were. Fae and dark fae. He was of the weaker species—it was what she was always told and had observed, and yet it was hers that was driven to the brink of extinction. Her kind that was forced into hiding for centuries. Her people who cowered high in the mountains.

So if the wicked could be afraid, and the good could be ruthless, why was there such divide at all?

“Do you need a room?” an elderly voice croaked like nails across wood, jolting her to release Kyleer.

Her sight didn’t turn to the human but rather flicked up to find Kyleer’s moss-green eyes watching her with a frown of confusion and question.

“I’m going to kill her,” Zaiana informed him.

“You don’t have to do that,” he protested firmly.

“We have no coin, and she’s not just going to let us pass.”

“Just let me try before you result to murder,” he grumbled under his breath, stalking away from her, hiding his bonds under his cloak.

It didn’t take long before he was returning, grinning like an idiot.

“How did you manage it?”

“My irresistible charm, as you’re familiar with.”

She pushed him and followed his lead, resisting the urge to take a blade to his back to stop his gloating.

They didn’t head upstairs—they came to the top of a set that headed down, and she didn’t follow when he descended a few steps.

“She wasn’t going to give us a cozy room she could get coin for,” he explained when he noticed she’d stopped. “She took pity on my story of us being a couple running from our betrothed, having no time to gather previsions and coin in our desperate pursuit of true love together.”

Zaiana’s stare on him widened to disbelief at the outlandish lie, and he broke into deep laughter.

His voice grew more distant as he headed down. “It might be a little colder in the cellar, but it’ll be better than being exposed to Lakelaria’s lethal temperatures. She said there’s blankets.”

Kyleer was swallowed by the dark abyss that set everything in her on edge. Her breathing hardened as she took her first step down. She couldn’t show her weakness here. Yet her hand lashed tight to the railing as she forced her next step. Fear was a terrible, hideous beast.

She heard his chains before his head came back into the light. He looked up at her, about to ask, but he read her exterior instead, so easily it was like she’d become clear words on a blank page to him.

“You have a fear of the dark?”

“No,” she bit out.

He reconsidered with a glance behind himself. “Underground?”

The confirmation was in her glare. Instead of mocking her about it, his expression relaxed.

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