Smolder (Crown of Fae #3) - Sharon Ashwood Page 0,12
she saw the guards finish their round of back-slapping and walk the other way, leaving Fionn standing alone.
As they turned, she saw their black-and-gold tabards. Leena’s stomach dropped, threatening to dislodge the soup she’d just eaten. Cold crept from her core, raising gooseflesh on her arms. Those weren’t Dorth’s guardsmen, after all, but Juradoc’s chosen men. Why was her brother with them?
“Fionn,” she cried, leaning out the window to wave.
He looked up with what seemed like a guilty start. “Hello, Leena.”
“Stay there,” she ordered before turning back to her room. She pulled on her only other pair of sandals, struggling with the broken lace that wouldn’t quite wrap around her ankle before racing down the stairs and into the street.
Fionn straightened from his slouch as she appeared, awarding her a bright smile. Tall and broad, with sandy curls and sky-blue eyes, he knew how to turn on the charm. Leena, however, was six years his senior and remembered wiping his runny nose.
“Hello, darling sister,” he said with the confident cheer of the mildly drunk.
“You’re keeping strange company.” She tried her best to keep the accusation out of her voice, but it didn’t quite work.
“I’m keeping pleasant company,” he replied, making an obvious effort to remain calm.
A wave of exasperation swept over her. After the scene at the banquet hall and the race to the temple with Elodie, she had no patience for Fionn’s recklessness. “They’re not our friends.”
He shrugged. “They have plans and ambitions. It’s a nice change.”
“From our own people?”
He shrugged. “The Kelthians lost the war. It’s time to move on.”
Leena’s breath caught at his casual words. “Juradoc’s men are the enemy.”
“Only if we insist they are.”
She tried to tell herself that he was too young to remember the carnage of battle. He was only eighteen now. “The general nearly killed Elodie tonight.”
“These men didn’t. They were with me,” he retorted, barely registering the news about their friend. “I’ve been with the guards most nights this week.”
His tone had an edge she hadn’t heard before—more than defiance. It was almost fury. It was then she noticed he was clutching a bundle under his arm. She snatched it away, shaking out the cloth.
It was a gold-and-black tabard. The cold that had gripped her before solidified, freezing her limbs in place.
“You’ve joined them.” She said it quietly, as if the words might shatter in her mouth.
Fionn sobered, the happy-go-lucky youth falling away. “I’ll make enough to buy our way out of this slum. Then we can have a proper house, just like you dreamed about. You can have a dowry, so you don’t have to dance for your supper anymore.”
She crushed the tabard in her hands. Since when did dreams bite like angry serpents? “Don’t do this for me.”
“Think about it, sister. Think beyond the sad fiddle music and nostalgia for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Kelthia is history best forgotten.”
“Fionn!”
“I need to earn my fortune with what I have. I’m not a servant of the temple like you are. I don’t have any talent for magic. I’m good with a sword and not much else.”
“What does that matter?”
“Do you really want to stay here forever?” He swept a hand around them, indicating the ramshackle streets. “You raised me to survive. Don’t blame me for learning my lessons.”
Leena’s throat hurt, a sure sign she was near tears. “How long have you been thinking this way?”
“Always,” he said. “Or as soon as I understood we were victims of the war. We are Kelthian fae, strong and fierce, but not strong and fierce enough. We won’t survive by clinging to the same old tactics, and I, at least, want a future.”
A mask had dropped, and her brother was gone. The strong young male looking back at her was a stranger.
“You must remember something of our home,” she said in the same strangled voice as before. “When our people refused to surrender, the Shades destroyed the very lands we stood on. They stripped our mountains bare, one after the other.”
The magic had been cataclysmic, volcanic. The destruction had lasted years, turning the sky black and blood red as the forests burned peak by peak. Seas of lava had consumed the green valleys, leaving them rivers of stone. Savage rains and floods came next, destroying what was left of the herds and crops. Eventually, the remaining rubble turned to dust.
And then came starvation. In the end, it was simple hunger that won the war. The proud fire fae of the mountains had finally been