My fingers rattle as I run my hand from fletching to tip, knowing he’s touched the arrow the same way just moments before.
I spin, searching the woods wildly for him, even though he’s long gone.
The scratched word, Cohen’s nickname for me, is rough beneath the pad of my thumb.
He missed intentionally.
Nothing makes sense. Not this arrow. Not his tracks.
The last time I saw Cohen was after a mountain cat attacked us in the woods, which caused me to be bedridden for a week and Cohen permanently scarred.
I ran a hand over my hair—?a sheet of silver under the stars and moonlight—?left down how Cohen liked it. Movement across the pasture caught my eye. It took squinting to make out Cohen’s form. When he’d visited earlier, he said he’d come again. My heart leaped at the sight.
Nerves rattled inside as I slipped into the shadows to meet him. After the accident, I vowed I wouldn’t wait to tell him of my feelings. Still I worried he didn’t feel the same.
The angry line under his left eye socked me with guilt. “Cohen, I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your—” He started to argue but stopped when my fingers twined with his.
“It kills me that you’re hurt. I—?I care about you . . .”
“I care about you too.” Heat from his skin spread through mine.
I summoned the courage to finally admit my feelings. “I—?I meant as more than just friends. I have feelings for you. I want to be with you, and I don’t ever want to lose you.”
His eyes widened, and dark sable swallowed the usual gold flecks.
“Britt” floated out. His head dipped, and he pressed his lips to my cheek, then the corner of my mouth. Soft and sweet. He asked me to wait for him. That he’d return the next morning.
Though confused, I agreed. For Cohen, I’d do anything. Then he whistled for Siron and left.
He didn’t come back like he said he would.
Not the next day. Not the following fall to apprentice. Not even when Papa died.
I stare deep into the darkness. We need each other, Leif said the other day, but he was wrong, because I don’t need any part of this.
I hate the way Cohen makes a mess of my thoughts. Hate that I’m here in these woods, hunting him for murder. Hate the doubts tangling my mind because they’re meaningless next to the truth in Lord Jamis’s words.
I snap Cohen’s arrow in two and throw it on the ground.
I hate him.
Chapter
8
THOUGH KING AODREN HAS YET TO DECLARE the country officially at war, the border town of Fennit is teeming with men in steel armor and chain mail. Tents the color of dishwater line the fields northward. To the west, across an expanse of wheat fields and clusters of wooded areas, pillars of smoke dot the horizon. Enemy camps. Preparing, waiting. Thousands upon thousands of men are here, and yet I’m somehow certain Cohen is too.
“My father never thought it would escalate to this,” I tell Leif. “Suspicions aren’t reason for war.”
Tension between Malam and Shaerdan has brewed for years. Papa told me of a time before King Aodren’s rule when a three-year drought decimated Malam’s crops. People blamed Shaerdan’s Channelers, who used to sell healing ointments all over Malam. Suspicion grew but it didn’t spread countrywide till the old king died from a sudden illness after a meeting with Shaerdan’s leader, the chief judge. People were convinced Channeler magic was to blame.
“Course not.” Leif leads his horse to follow the captain through Fennit’s busy market. “But it’s like a pot of water over the fire. Eventually it’ll boil.”
“Sure it’ll heat up. Not explode,” I argue.
He shrugs. “I heard they’re after our ore, too.”
I frown. “That doesn’t make sense.” When commerce had faltered between Malam and Shaerdan, many merchants had been unable to feed their families. The king had been forced to reinstate the ore trade—?the one resource that would bring back some of the funds lost when the border closed.
“Their chief judge wants to own a mine in our mountains,” Leif tells me. “King Aodren declined his request two months ago. Then their soldiers plundered one of our border towns.”
That was right after Papa died and my mourning started. The isolation kept me from hearing this news earlier.
Tomas sidles up to us. “They wanna make us heathens like them and their black magic.” He hasn’t uttered more than a dozen words since killing the fawn. I mourn the loss of his silence.
“What do you know of that?” I challenge.
“I heard about one. A real whore, cheating on her husband.”
I cringe at the word whore.
“The old man went fishing with his fellows,” Tomas continues, “and his heathen of a wife did some devilry and made a wave as tall as the Castle Neart crash on that boat. Killed ’em all.”
He sounds like a gossiping market crow. “Horse dung.”
“You snit.” Tomas white-knuckles his reins. “What do you know?”
“I know not to believe rumors.”