Page 108 of A Sword of Ice
Then his mouth opened, and a sound keeled from his throat. “Mm-ahhh-hhiii-hha…”
It was then that Iona noticed he did not have his tongue.
Horror, disgust, and a frightening anger roiled in her gut.
“Mm—mmaahiiha!”
“I’m sorry,” she began, swallowing past the lump in her throat. “I don’t understand you. Are you okay? Are you hurt? I can get Ryker, he’s our healer…”
He shook his head vigorously and gestured at her with his hands. “Mmm-aa-hii-hha…” When she stared blankly at him, he gestured, growing more agitated the more she misunderstood. He repeated even slower the sounds. They rolled off his lips until…
Iona’s breath caught in her throat.
“Malika?”
His eyes lit up, and he nodded.
“Yes?”
He grasped for her weakly, hands sliding up and down her arms, and he kept repeating it in his mumbling, broken sounds. But Iona understood, and it was like everything falling into place in a single instant.
She grabbed his wrist, trying to keep her touch light even while her body suddenly vibrated with anticipation. She pulled him towards the Fae, marching him straight to Weylyn, still covered from head to toe in blood.
With her other hand, she grabbed his wrist and hauled him away from the line of soldiers and their small group of Fae watching over them. When she found a modicum of privacy, she turned to Weylyn.
His golden eyes were glittering, his lips tilted up in a sneer.
“Fuck off with that look,” she growled at him. “I need you.”
His dark brows rose, and he leaned towards her. She’d never realized how tall he was until he was looming above her. She was tall herself, and she’d dismissed Weylyn as unimpressive before because when compared to Julius, he was like a mere fragment of an ice cube next to a solid block of ice. Besides, the last time they’d been in close proximity, there’d still been space between them.
He seemed threatening now.
“Oh, my sweet Iona, as delectable as you are…” His fingers gripped her chin, and she felt her skin stain with blood. “You are just not my type.”
Iona jerked away from him and that eerie voice of his. “Will you quit with the fucking jokes?” She wasn’t in the mood for his games. She felt like she was balancing on the very delicate edge of the precipice of the truth she’d been searching for, for years. “I need your magic,” she clarified, gesturing at the broken-down Fae next to them. “I need you to use your magic on him and ask him mind-to-mind how exactly he knows my sister.”
46
A Ghost of the Past
Weylyn straightened, smoothing out the front of his jacket. His posture was too leveled, his gaze too sharp. He looked like he was a lord holding court, but the only royals among them were Valerio, Clay, and maybe even Uric.
His gaze snapped over to the Fae, and there was no word of warning before his magic pounced. It struck like a force of lightning, and Iona didn’t have time to cry out before she was enveloped in a foreign sensation. Her vision blanked and she was swallowed up by the darkness until it was all she could see. It felt like she was suspended in nothingness, like her soul had been hauled straight from her body and was dangling over a cliff.
And then she heard a voice.
Weylyn’s voice.
“Speak, Fae. How do you know her sister?”
The sound came from everywhere and nowhere at once, pulsing around her. The worst part of this magic was that she could not see where it was coming from. She was completely blinded with nothing other than her hearing.
“She was kind to me,” a voice replied. The old Fae’s. His inner voice thankfully still intact. It was a tremulous, dusty sound. “They brought her here. I thought you were her, because you look so alike, but she was thinner. She did not have hair.”
Somewhere beyond this sensation, Iona could feel tears prick at her eyes at the declaration.
In her family, their hair had been a sense of pride; even her brother and father had long locks. Iona had inherited her father’s silver hair, and so had her brother. Her sister’s hair had been dark like their mother’s, and she’d kept it in thin braids. To think of her being degraded like that was crippling.
