by Terah Edun
Electing to keep talking to him—because despite his dirtiness, there was still something there that drew her—she asked, even as her eyes watered, “How is it possible that you haven’t noticed your stench?”
“I turned off my nose,” he said, as if that was the most reasonable answer in the world.
She might be feeling generous, as he was clearly suffering from some sort of mental unwellness, but her kindness ended at bold-faced lies.
“Excuse me?” Mae asked.
He repeated what he had said before, and Mae looked at him as if he was crazy, because he was.
“That’s impossible.”
And it was—no human could close off a sense as they pleased. If it was possible, she would have taken advantage of that wondrous gift from the moment this conversation started.
He narrowed his eyes. “I daresay it is, in fact, possible, because I have done so.”
Mae snorted. She wasn’t interested in getting an argument with the dirty, stinky visitor to her holding.
But neither was she going to let his fallacies pass without comment.
“Either you’re crazy or you’re lying,” Mae said.
“Neither,” the boy said.
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I hardly think you could be trusted to acknowledge either faculty.”
“And I’m not going to sit here and let you call me by either insult,” the boy said. “I am neither crazy nor a liar.”
He turned away, prepared to leave, and she couldn’t resist. There was something about him. His presence, though caustic and irritating, drew her in. Mae was well aware it wasn’t a good draw. It felt a little like a bird being mesmerized by a shiny object only to realize that behind it lurked a predator, but it was exciting. The kind of excitement she hadn’t had in her short life, much less in the past year, while her siblings slowly drifted off under a cloud of darkness thanks to their illness.
To have that feeling, to just test it once more, she was willing to take that chance.
As he walked away, she called out, “Wait!”
He turned back and shot her a piercing look that felt like it set her skin on fire.
Mae frowned.
It’s more than that, though, she thought as she rubbed her chest. It was like the fire was bubbling under the surface of her tattoos specifically.
It felt so strange that she had to wonder for a second if something was about to happen. But the feeling subsided from one moment to the next, and she was just left with her surprise.
Although from the way he was looking at her, as if she was the half-crazy one, her discomfort had been visually apparent.
In an off-hand manner, the boy asked, “Something the matter?”
“No,” Mae said—not wanting to discuss something she wasn’t even sure she understood herself.
11
Trying to shake off the weird feeling was hard, but Mae did it.
She didn’t have time to focus on herself when others were dying. So, she pushed down the sensation as much as she could and told herself to take calm breaths.
Her eyes had been closed while all of this was going down, and when she opened them, the boy with the weird, glimmering eyes was still staring at her.
It was almost as if he had been prepared to leave, but her panic attack had caused him to stay.
And from the calculating interest she saw in his expression, Mae was not fool enough to think he’d done so out of concern or good will. Whatever had just happened to her had caught his attention.
The problem was…she didn’t want it catching anyone in her family. If messing with the illicit text would get her punished, she couldn’t imagine what fooling with her tattooed collarbone would do. Even if it had been tangential to someone else’s actions, she was still responsible, as the ink was infused with the skin of her breast.
Mae rushed to get his mind, and hers, off the improbable.
“Is there something else I can help you with?” she said dryly. She dropped her hands from where they fiddled with the skin along her collarbone and stared at him dead-on.
“Else?” he asked coyly.
Mae gave him a thin smile. “Well, I did give you a free service—warning you about your malodorous odor, even though you seem less than concerned.”
A corner of his mouth flicked up into a hint of smile, but that was all he gave her. “Different things concern you and me. A smell, even if I could sense it, is far less interesting that a girl who glows even surrounded by darkness.”
Mae sucked in a breath. “What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, really?” he asked, pacing around her.
She felt like a fish in a barrel staring up at the cat that wanted to eat it. Except she’d categorize him less of a feline and more of a cold-blooded viper.
She sighed softly and exhaled, trying to regain control over a confrontation it seemed she had lost.
“You seem mighty confused about normal bodily functions,” she said. “Humans don’t glow, and we certainly don’t turn off our noses.”
“Maybe I’m special.”
Mae rolled her eyes. “Not in the way you think.”
“I think your nose is broken, as my peoples’ are fine-tuned to discard most undesirable scenes,” the foreign boy quipped.
She shook her head.
“Maybe you’re cursed with the inability to understand or your brain is broken, there’s no other explanation for your olfactory deficits,” she stated flatly.
He glared at her.
“Take that back,” the boy spat.
“Not a chance,” she said, not willing to engage anymore. “I wouldn’t wish your condition on the holding’s worst but in your case, I’ll make a special exception—
“I am cursed,” he said flatly. “But not in the way you think.”
Mae froze for a moment, wondering if he was just making fun of her. She had just been trying to scare him off, but a shiver went down her spine the second he uttered those words. If she believed in curses, which she didn’t—even with all the superstitious drivel her grandmother had laid on her—Mae would have said the dark gods were looking her way.
But that was just as foolish a concept as this poor boy thinking he could do what he done.
Shaking it off, Mae rolled her eyes. She’d had it up to here with his weird imagination. “More likely you just smeared something under your nose to mask your smell and forgot about it,” she replied stubbornly.
Her theory made a lot more sense—she knew that enough of a special poultice infused with lavender could make anything temporarily odorless. Although he didn’t smell like anything fresh in her mind, let alone lavender petals.
But why lie about it? Mae thought as she stared at the stranger in confusion.
Grimacing, she felt some residual jitters along her breastbone. Not enough to scratch, but certainly enough to unsettle.
He apparently decided that was his business, because he said, “For someone so fixated on my concept of reality, you seem to be ignoring your own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“It means,” he said as he slowly walked over, “that your body is trying to tell you something and you are doing everything in your power to ignore it. To the point that you’re letting it eat away at you.”
“I’m not,” she snapped as she took a few steps back, out of his circle of influence and downwind from his smell at the same time, which was two wins in one as far as she was concerned.
“Do I make you nervous?” he asked, cocking his head to the side quizzically.
“No, I’m itchy,” she said, and immediately regretted it.
She had just wanted to say anything to get him off her case; she was the one who should be leading this conversation, not him, after all. But what had stumbled out was more of a faux pas.
“Oh.” He chortled. “What a comeback. I think you’re hiding something…like a burning desire to jump in my pan
ts.”
Mae flushed from the roots of her hair to her neckline, but she quickly saw he was baiting her. This amused him. Well, she could give as good as she got.
“Trust me,” Mae said. “I have better taste than to fall for someone who smells like he landed in a refuse pile and made it his home.”
“Your mouth says one thing, but your aura seems to be saying another.”
“I am not attracted to you!” Mae screamed. If she hadn’t been so infuriated with him, she might have stopped to ask him just what he meant by her aura but at the moment Mae was going practically insane trying to refute him and now she’d had an outburst the entire household would know about within hours.
It was inevitable seeing as they happened to be standing in the open mezzanine of the holding’s first building. It was three levels of floors, with one central courtyard open to the skies on the first floor. She was on the third floor with him, and her scream echoed up and down like a banshee’s wail.
She turned around to see members of her family stopped in their tracks and staring at her.
“Oh no,” Mae said, utterly mortified.
She wasn’t really feeling castigated because of what she had done—or rather, what it appeared she had done—but because she knew how it would look to those who’d had a hand in raising her. Her holding and others like it all across the kingdom ostracized outsiders for a reason. They were uncouth, loud, libidinous, and without piety. Or so she had heard. Now, experiencing all of that in at least this foreigner, Mae had to say the rumors were right.
She was tempted to keep yelling, but from the horrified looks on everyone’s faces, she had already done enough.
Mae threw her head back and growled at the sky. “It’s not fair,” she wailed.
And it wasn’t. From the moment she had woken up today, life had seemed to be after her like an avenging spirit. What had she done to be ashamed and punished all in the same day?
She was a good girl.
Most of the time.
“I don’t deserve this,” Mae said, rubbing her chest. It felt like she was getting indigestion, but under her skin and nowhere near her stomach. Whatever it was, it was slowly making her insane.
As if that wasn’t enough, the foreign boy spoke again.
With a satisfied air, he said, “Well, I guess that now your entire family knows, we might as well get married and have those hatchlings.”
Mae’s head snapped up and she reiterated his words in her head. Through gritted teeth, Mae responded, “Over my dead body.”
The mirth in his eyes was unmistakable. “You have no idea just what that means in my culture.”
Revolted, Mae leaned away from him. “I hope you’re happy—I’ve embarrassed myself in front of my entire family.”
The foreigner made a show of looking all around. With a shrug, he turned back. “By my count, it’s more like a dozen or so of them.”
She glared at him. “People talk.”
“Hmmm,” he murmured. “And you care why?”
“Because it’s not true!” She felt like tearing her hair out by this point—they were going around in circles, and she still needed to track her sister and that blasted text down.
“What? That you don’t love or you do?” he asked.
“Both!” Mae snarled.
He began laughing hard.
“Neither!” she quickly said when she realized her mistake.
He just kept laughing. Louder and louder. And the sounds of her family members slowly making their way over to them under the guise of being concerned grew louder and louder. And the buzzing, itching sensation underneath her skin grew stronger and stronger.
Until she couldn’t take it anymore.
Something had to give.
Mae lashed out with her hand. She just meant to swipe his hair in frustration. Maybe his face, too. But she never made contact, because his arm reacted so fast that she didn’t even see it. One moment she was about to hit him, and the next he had her in a vise grip and yanked forward. Close enough that she could see that the beautiful, almost mesmerizing hint of amber in his eyes had transformed into a fiery orange.
She shrank back, or she tried to, but she couldn’t go anywhere, because he was leaning forward and pulling her arm toward him, and suddenly it was as if she only weighed a few pounds and he was a metric ton.
Unsettling wasn’t even the word for what she felt at that moment.
But she was quiet, and she listened as the loud buzzing that had been building in her head dimmed.
He didn’t wait for her to say anything, though. The foreign boy just spoke with deadly calm.
“Maybe you are the one that needs to get control of yourself,” he said. “Particularly your emotions.”
Mae trembled as he gripped her arm so tightly that her blood stopped circulating to her hand. But she wasn’t afraid of him; she was afraid of herself. Even as the mental buzzing had died down, she still felt that itch, and it was like nothing she had ever experience before. Her skin was hot, and as much as she wanted to deny it, the itchy sensation was growing.
Except this time it was burning and her emotions were rioting. This wasn’t like her.
What was going on? she wondered.
Before she could figure it out, the boy shook her arm hard.
“Do you hear me?” he said harshly.
Mae yelped and heard the stirring of her watching family behind her.
But he didn’t even look around…despite the fact that at least a dozen members were coming their way, and Mae spotted at least two armed with farming implements.
She didn’t want to turn this into bloody fight. Especially when it was her fault.
“Okay!” Mae said.
Then he let her go, and his face smoothed over, from an intense hardness to almost bored air.
Rubbing her wrist, the bruise marks already forming, she whirled on her heels.
“I’m leaving,” she declared. “Just do what you want and stink up wherever you go.”
They both knew she was speaking out of bravado. She couldn’t stop him even if she had the desire to try.
He looked her over with still-angry eyes, but he slowly relaxed, and Mae felt the hairs on the back of her neck settle down.
As if it was an everyday occurrence to threaten women, he replied, “The next time you try to strike one of my people, just a warning—you’d better not miss.”
She didn’t have much to say to that, other than wondering if all Algardians were as scary as he. She didn’t ask. She had more pressing concerns at the moment, like why her chest was burning, what it meant, and why she had reacted so harshly to his words.
She couldn’t say she had the best control over herself, but Mae had never been so out of control before today.
Could it be the book? Mae thought. Maybe it’s affecting me somehow.
Mae thought about it for a second. She hadn’t read any casting spells from it; she’d been just searching through its pages. But if her grandmother had put warning incantations in her library against outsiders, Mae wouldn’t put it past her to do the same on her precious text.
Which meant I was such a fool to touch it in the first place! Mae thought furiously.
Then her heart began to race, because Ember had the book now. And suddenly Mae was no longer concerned for herself or what was happening to her—she just wanted warn her sister not to touch it.
Heart in her throat, Mae turned toward the family corridors to maybe save her sister from the burning sensation that was a constant ebb and flow underneath Mae’s skin. As her panic rose, Mae felt the sharp pain of the buzzing sting—in both her mind and on her flesh—arise again.
But this time, instead of it being a painful symptom, she saw it for what it was.
A warning.
One from her soul that said what she had been doing was wrong, and that if she didn’t correct her course, she’d have a lot more to worry about than a malodorous foreigner.
Like a curse that she c
ouldn’t walk away from.
12
Mae wanted to get to her sister as fast as possible. Vengeance had driven her through the house after she realized Ember had stolen the tome she herself had pilfered first. But now? It wasn’t anger that drove her—it was fear. Unfortunately, the moment she turned around to get to where she was absolutely certain her sibling had skipped off to, she was faced down by more family than she had ever seen in one place except at dinnertime.
Mae almost stopped in her tracks when all of the angry faces confronted her. Of course, they weren’t mad at her but at the foreign gentleman she had been having a rather vigorous argument with. And they weren’t blind. They’d seen her take a swing at him, and it didn’t matter that he had been stopping her blow. What mattered was that he’d touched her at all.
It just wasn’t done.
Regardless of who she was and who he was.
The society of Nardes operated on a very strict precept of order—males did not assault females, and females, in turn, knew their place. That place was subservient. Below all other male relatives in her family, young or old. She had been taught this from birth, just as it had been drilled into her head that the god of the stars had made it this way to protect her and her gender, the ones that magic had rejected, from harm.
Of course, Mae had taken to those lessons like oil mixed with water. She didn’t believe her uncles and cousins should be more important than her because of the dangly bits they’d been born with. And she tended to voice that opinion whether they liked it or not.
But there was a big difference between her acting out against the role society had preordained for her in private with the family and doing so publicly with a stranger. Arguing with him in a raised tone was the first strike. Physically engaging in a fight with him? Oh, that was tantamount to her calling her male relatives into battle…and the nosey female ones as well.
So now that she was done, they swelled forward to dispense their own brand of justice, and for a second Mae actually felt sorry for the young foreigner. Sorry enough that she edged to the side to block her relatives’ advance and halt a mob from forming around him.
