Page 113 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
Out of instinct, my power sparked as I called upon the winds to yank the arrow out of the sky. It mercifully answered. Barely.
The arrow didn’t fall to the ground.
It only changed direction, embedding itself in the tree the Commander leaned against.
He didn’t even flinch, giving me a totally unimpressed look. Didnothingrattle this man?
“How long have you been standing there?” I barked, acutely aware I’d spilled more of myself than I’d ever meant to. The wind and the snow had frozen the hesitation and given me a false sense of endless solitude.
Being out in the wild always did that to me. Made me feel unlimited.
It helped to talk about Waden, a figment of my youngling heart, than to deal with the real pain of the present. And my powers answering my call, even hesitantly, proved that.
I flexed my fingers; they no longer felt so cold.
“Long enough to know I shouldn’t give you any of my family’s heirloom jewels. I don’t want to go fishing for them in the ocean,” the Commander said.
Of course he’d heard. I’d laid my past bare, caught in the wind and arrows, and now those ugly truths hung in the air, taut like my bow string.
I was acutely aware of my cheeks heating up at the sight of him, his promise of carrying me out of my room still maddeningly fresh in my mind–as was the shame of having him see me so vulnerable for so many times.
Harmless, he’d called me, had he?
“Maybe I’ll keep yours.” I tilted that pointed chin of mine as far as it would go. “I think it would annoy you more to have your gold adorning my neck than to let it waste away among the reef.”
The Protectorate vaults definitely needed all the help they could get.
But I wouldn’t see them again, would I?
I couldn’t stop the fresh wave of sadness this time. I was still thinking like the old Allegra, the one who wanted to better her Clan. A Clan who’d turned its back on her.
The Commander gave the arrow a bored, lazy look and kicked himself away from the tree. A rain of snow cascaded from the icy branches behind him, like nature itself shivered at his passing.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, flustered and doing a piss-poor job at hiding it. Nadya and Geryll remained silent, but I saw the way they gave each other pointed looks.
“I came to give you the news.” He stopped at the top of the hill, gazing down at me. “The Council sent over the marriage contract. Ready to fight over it?”
Chapter
Twenty-One
ALLIE
“This wasn’t what I thought you meant byfighting.” I stared down the long table littered with too many parchments and papers to count. Some of them looked to have been dragged from the deepest recesses of vaults nobody had opened for generations. The last time I’d witnessed so many numbers etched onto rows upon rows, I’d been losing nights over the Protectorate vault ledgers.
Another wasted effort nobody else in my Clan had bothered with–or appreciated.
“A negotiation is a fight in anything but the name,” the Commander said from the other end of the table. “Or were you expecting some crazy plan to go against the Clan Council and dismantle the system holding the entirety of Malhaven together from being destroyed by Clan wars?”
Well…it wouldn’t have been the most ridiculous idea someone had this month. Silas was currently leading the Protectorate, after all.
“We could have at least sent more emissaries and tried to change the magistrates’ minds,” I grumbled.
“Soryn, your cousin Clara, and all of our best negotiators have already done what they could,” he said, his voice a distant echo in this cavernous dining room coated with thick, carved stones. Only the candles and the massive fireplace kept us company, along with the ancient weapons adorning the walls.
Even with the Commander’s size and my archer eyesight, I had to strain in my chair to see past the stacks of paper to see him–fifty of his biggest, fiercest warriors could have feasted at this table without bumping elbows.
Two enemies divided by contracts which would seal their futures together.
