He almost pulled her from the kitchens early this morning, Malakai’s scouts had found a body. He knew another day of training would be as eventful as the previous week's worth of sessions. He waited for her and watched her as she shrugged on her jacket.
“You’re already late.”
“There were extra dishes this morning. Can I expect to do something useful with you today, or will it be more sitting and growling and glaring? Or will I just wind up chopping wood for hours on end?”
He didn’t deign a response as he entered the halls, but she follows him. The demi-Fae that they pass seem shocked, he glanced over his shoulder and sees that she is smiling. Something in his heart leaps. He was not certain if she had smiled during her time here. A small part of him, that tiny part of him that was thawing in response to her fire wondered when was the last time she smiled.
“They’ve all been keeping their distance because of the scent you put out.”
“Excuse me?”
He almost laughed when she sniffed herself.
“There are more males than females here -- and they’re fairly isolated from the world. Haven’t you wondered why they haven’t approached you?”
The scent she put out was barely tolerable to even those that had zero interest in the girl. He often wondered how Luca and Emrys dealt with it. Especially Luca, his sense of smell was stronger than most demi-fae and he was young.
“They stayed away because I . . . smell?”
“Your scent says that you don't want to be approached. The males smell it more than the females, and have been staying the hell away. They don’t want their faces clawed off.”
“Good, I’m not interested in men . . . males.”
Of all the responses he expected, it was not that one and he also knew it was not true. Her lover had been male, he awoke almost every morning with the taste of her blood in his mouth. The embers with the hint of a human male lover. He wondered if he bit her now, if that hint would be gone, leaving just the embers.
“What happens if you become queen? Will you refuse a potential alliance through marriage?”
He watched her as she thought about it, thought about the costs of being royalty. He was baiting her, looking to see what her response would be. If she would take the role expected of a queen. And a part of him, a very small part of him wondered if such an alliance would destroy her.
“Nice try.”
With a smirk, “You’re learning.”
“You get baited by me every now and then, too, you know.”
Gods he knew and he still wondered what it was about the girl that melted his cool exterior, how she got under his skin.
“Where the hell are we going today? We never head west.”
“You want to do something useful, So here’s your chance.”
He led them to the husk of a female body, exactly where Malakai said it would be.
“What did this?
He examined the remains, what ever did this left just the skin and bones.
“Why not just dump her in the sea? Leaving her in a stream seems idiotic. They left tracks, too -- unless those are from whoever found her.”
Malakai gave me the report this morning -- and he and his men are trained not to leave tracks. But this scent . . . I’ll admit is different.”
He continued to study the body, every sweep made him more furious.
“So you tell me, assassin. You wanted to be useful.”
He truly was an ass.
“You claimed you didn’t know what that thing in the barrow field was, I think this is what it does.”
He sniffed the surroundings, rotten and wrong.
“You came out of that darkness looking as if someone had sucked the life from you. Your skin was a shade paler, your freckles gone.”
“It forced me to go through . . . memories. The worst kind. Have you ever heard of a creature that can feed on such things? When I glimpsed it, I saw a man -- a beautiful man, pale and dark-haired, with eyes of full black. He wasn’t human. I mean, he looked it, but his eyes -- they weren’t human at all.”
In his almost three centuries he never come across such a creature.
“Even my queen doesn’t know every foul creature roaming these lands. If skinwalkers are venturing down from the mountains, perhaps other things are, too.”
He was shocked when she requests to burn the body, it was in that moment he knew that her hard exterior was just that an exterior. She felt, maybe deeper than most. He could not help but think of the little girl that dreamed of seeing the world. Dreamed the dreams that would never come true for her because she was born to be a queen. A queen that had seen horrors and had somehow survived them. A queen that did not wish for the world world to burn. While he coaxed the wind to control the fire, he decided he would take her to the healing commune, he wanted for her see a little good in the world.