Elora’s eyebrow crooked. She hadn’t expected such forwardness, but maybe she should have. Maybe that’s why honesty was working so well on this girl, because she didn’t know any other way to be.
“Sorry, was that rude of me to say? I don’t know—” Princess Kestrel hung her head again.
“No, not at all. I’m just not used to people being so?—”
“Unaware of basic common knowledge?”
Elora laughed. An honest, genuinelaugh. “I was going to say so forthright with their thoughts.”
Kestrel smirked up at her in thanks, and cursed sky if the responding twitch of Elora lips didn’t deepen.
She cleared her throat and ripped her gaze forward. “The Ashen do not age. My first life ended shortly after I turned twenty. I died. I was reborn. And I haven’t aged a day since. None of us have.”
“How old are you now then?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know. I haven’t had much reason tokeep track.” Something cracked in Elora’s chest, and she bit down on the warmth that rose in the back of her throat.
“Sorry,” Kestrel said softly, and she sounded as if she genuinely meant it. As if she wasn’t afraid of Elora for being seemingly immortal at all. Come to think of it, she hadn’t even scooted away when Elora sat down. Kestrel looked a little sheepish as she added, “And here I am complaining about something that probably seems so trivial. Just doing what I always do, overthinking about the worst possible outcomes, even though I know it does me no good.”
“Worrying is only natural,” Elora said once she had composed herself.
“Sure, but to what end? All worrying does is make me feel frantic and weak. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’tdoanything. I just sit and stew, like a coward, instead of being brave like my—” She cut herself off, but Elora already knew what she had been about to say.
“Like your father?” Ire bubbled inside her like a festering wound.
Kestrel nodded, a single tear dripping down her cheek and landing on the rabbit’s blood-tinged fur.
This was a subject they could not discuss, not without Elora spewing like the churning volcanoes of Galorfin. Telling this weeping girl how much the traitor deserved the pain that was coming to him would not be the sort of thing that would ingratiate her toward her.
All mention ofDarius Graemeaside though, Elora was surprised to find herself actually relating to this young woman—the daughter of the people who had caused her suffering for years. She had lost count of the times she had fallen into a dark pit of grief and guilt over her own actions, what she could’ve done differently, if there was still anything left to do to changeher own circumstances. It was a dangerous cycle of thought to be trapped inside.
“I have days like those,” she confided. “Blessed moon, I have entire weeks and months like those.”
“You do?”
“Of course. You spend enough time away from your homeland, from the ones who truly understand you, who seeyou, and you start to believe that…maybe you are different. Wrong in some innate way.” How many times had she wished to be someone other than herself? For her magic to cease. To benormal. But Elora had since learned that normal was a lie, a falsehood that people told themselves to justify the pain they were causing others. Defiantly, she smiled to herself, almost forgetting Kestrel was even there. “But if you’re lucky, you remember that the very same reasons these strangers make you think you are weak and wrong are the same reasons in which you are strong and great.”
It had been that truth, that mantra, which had kept Elora from breaking all these years.
“I don’t really have anyone who truly understands me. I thought my father—” she shook her head, a red curl springing from the place where it was tightly pulled back. “But it turns out most of what he taught me wasn’t true. He told me there was no one left out here, and yet I have met so many people now…but the first one I met lied to me as well. And now I’m having a hard time trusting anything.” Kestrel’s eyes were still wet as she looked up at Elora. “How do you convince yourself of something like that, that you’re strong when you feel nothing like it and so much evidence is pointing to the contrary?”
Elora had to think a long while before she could answer.
“I suppose it helps that, where I come from, my people are proud of our magic. Everyone else claims it to be evil. But in Eynallore, we use our power to disrupt invasive species so thatwe can preserve the unique flora of our forests. We put injured creatures out of their misery, so they don’t have to suffer—a long time ago, we offered the same to terminally ill humans. Because to us, death is an honor. A privilege. Something to be celebrated, not something to be feared.”
Kestrel’s voice was shaking between rage and sorrow. “Even unwarranted deaths? Brutal ones that didn’t need to happen?”
Elora couldn’t answer.
The truth was she had always found the queen’s methods far too insidious, the magic unnecessarily ruthless, and quite honestly, a bit suspect. If the Sky-Blessed were by some chance bestowing miracles upon the Skogarans, it seemed unlikely they would require such bloody sacrifices.
But saying any of that wouldn’t steer Kestrel closer to the queen or her magic.
She was toeing a fine line between honesty and outright duplicity.
“Maybe some deaths we don’t understand or have a hard time accepting, but they are still warranted, yes.” She didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears.
“Yeah?” Kestrel laughed bitterly. “And what about those shackles they have you wear? Are those warranted too?”
