Page 24 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

It had to be a sick nightmare. Had to be.

But even in her half-charred state, my squadmate’s beauty was as undeniable as it was devastating, just like there was no denying how fate repeatedly robbed me of anyone who ever treated me with an ounce of damned kindness.

Of everyone I traveled with, why did it have to be her?

“No,” I breathed, a band tightening around my chest. “Not you too, Stre.”

I couldn’t stop staring, despite the acid burning at my throat.

Her once full, rosy lips that would never peel into a smile again.

Plump cheeks that would never see another dimple either.

Her warm hazel eyes would never hold a twinkle of mischief again.

Not in this life, at least.

Part of me couldn’t comprehend that it was really her body I was looking at, not with how it felt like only moments or maybe hours ago we were just leaving the fortress, staring down weeks of travel.

And now, she was…dead.

As I stood there, trying to process how in the hell this could have happened to her—happened to everyone on display around me—something struck my mind.

A memory, maybe. Streja’s voice, fragmented and distant.

“Here, princess. Let me put you to bed.”

“Crash in my tent; it’s closer.”

“I’m so sorry, Nor. It’ll be over soon.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and took a slow breath.

A sudden recall of my mind’s own doing did not feel trustworthy, especially not memories covered in a thick layer of mud.

It took everything in me to replace the cloth over Streja’s body and turn around. Both Maksym and his mage were watching me with clear apprehension from across the cellar.

“What proof was this supposed to be?” I asked, and, goddess, my voice was shaky. “That someone set out to brutalize us and succeeded horrifically at it? It could have been anyone, including you.”

Maksym took a few steps toward me, trailing his fingers over the edge of a table. “I wondered whether it would be as obvious to you. Jasper seemed to think an Odessan royal would be educated enough to know. I wasn’t convinced, but…” He stopped in front of me and shrugged.

He was close enough that I had to shift my attention upward, and the clean, masculine scent that rolled off him temporarily drenched the char hanging in the air.

My lip curled as I ground out, “Speak. Plainly.”

One of his angular eyebrows rose, but he was quick to turn his attention to Streja. “I’ll spare you the detailed history lesson.” He pulled back just the edge of the cloth, exposing her charred arm and hand. “Dark fae could not inflict burns with blackened flesh like this.”

He cast me a sidelong glance and turned over Streja’s palm to expose more burned and blistered skin.

“The damned light pantheon stripped us of our influence over your fire thousands of years ago during The Divide. We cannot wield, amplify, or conjure anything other than the blue nytefire you see all around you, and it renders white burns. This was the work of someone of Odessan or High Fae blood.”

Regretfully, these were all things I knew from countless hours of history lessons, but things I never considered.

When war broke out between the gods those thousands of years ago, and they split into the upper and lower pantheons—the light and dark gods—the upper saw that the adopted peoples of their disgraced brethren were not given an easy ride.

The enormous umbrella of shifters, umbrites, and other creatures, who became homogenized as the dark fae, did indeed lose their influence over fire, a gift given to living creatures by one of the oldest gods of the upper pantheon.

Flame would wither as soon as flint was struck. Torches would die when passed into a dark fae hand. A tragic and trying time for their people, or so the history texts said, until one of the lower pantheon, Mina, gave them a gift of her own—nytefire.