White Stag (Permafrost #1)(32)

I brought them out of the water, careful to keep my chest from being seen. It was stupid, I knew. He’d already seen the mass of scar tissue, the bits of skin that snagged and curled grotesquely where Lydian had dug in his fingernails and sunk his teeth and burned with a white-hot brand, but I couldn’t bear the idea of showing them to the world again.

“Yes, they hurt,” I said, glaring at the blisters and burned flesh. From the sight of Soren’s smooth, pale skin, he must have already healed. That had to be the single good thing about being a goblin: As long as they weren’t near a swift-moving source of water and were inside the boundaries of the Permafrost, the spirit of the landscape healed them.

“May I see?” he asked.

“Why?”

He tilted his head to the side. “You don’t trust me?”

“Must I answer that, again?” I asked, then sighed. “Fine.” He took one injured arm in his hand and brought it close to his lips. I jerked back. “What are you doing?”

Soren let out an irritated hiss. “Just wait.” Then, he twisted my arm to the lightly colored underside and brought his lips to the vein in my elbow. As he pressed his teeth to the skin with the slightest of pressure, his humanlike features melted away. His eyes grew slanted and his face became gaunt, the tips of pointed ears peaked out of the cascade of white hair, and the length of his canines grew until they pierced through my arm. I shivered as a chill went through me from my neck all the way to my belly. When he pulled away, the burns on my arm had gone.

I stared at my now-healed arm. No scars—nothing remained as a reminder of the Fire Bog. The light-brown skin was as smooth as it had been this morning. While I marveled, he took my other arm and did the same.

When he was done, he sat back and admired his handiwork and looked utterly satisfied with himself.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said.

“We’re all full of surprises,” he replied. “You don’t know everything about me.”

“You don’t know everything about me either.”

He chuckled. “I bet I know more than you think.”

I rolled my eyes. “While this conversation is lovely, some of us need to get out of the water and change. Go back to the others.”

“Is that an order?” he asked, his voice almost teasing.

I glowered at him in response. “Go.”

He stood, brushing the frost-covered dirt off his leggings, and turned away, heading toward a stunted tree in the distance. “Meet me by the lightning-struck tree after you’re dressed. We need to talk.”

Muttering some choice words under my breath, I slid out of the water and wrung my hair dry, then quickly dressed. The warm woolen wraps felt good against my legs, and the thick furs lining my tunic took the chill from my body. My hair, which I’d taken out of its braids, was plastered against my face and neck, dripping water down the length of my back. I tied it up in a high ponytail, hoping it would keep the worst of the water away.

Dread rose slowly as I glanced to where Soren went. In a crowd of goblins in the Erlking’s hall, or in his manor’s archery range shooting at corpses, it was easy to be around him. But as soon as the others disappeared, everything changed. Maybe it was the infuriating way he’d tilt his head like a child acting at innocence, maybe it was how what he said needled me into long conversations where we shot words at each other like arrows. I was good at snark and being witty. I was not good at talking.

So I gathered myself, composed my features into an emotionless mask, and joined Soren by the stunted tree.

He lounged among the roots as if they were his own personal throne. The ancient tree was blackened by lightning, and its skeleton arms reached up toward the sky. The sun-bleached white roots covered the ground around us, growing over each other and twining together like a mass of snakes. I sat a few feet away from him and waited.

He turned so his body was facing mine. The animalistic features of his face had returned to their natural, eerie, too-perfect-to-be-human look. “Do you think something is wrong with you, Janneke?”

I almost choked, the mask I’d composed shattering into a million shards. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” Of course something was wrong with me. I was sitting here next to the world’s most deadly predator, hunting a sacred stag in the middle of the Permafrost, after one hundred years of servitude that should’ve left me dead. I was the epitome of wrongness.

“I’m serious,” Soren said, and from the glint in his eyes, I believed him.

“Yes.”

“Even before you were brought to the Permafrost?”

I thought about it. Growing up, I watched my sisters get married and have babies, one by one, while I ran wild in the woods and learned to use a bow and axe like they were extensions of myself. When the young men of the village erected courtship poles outside the huts of the girls they admired every midsummer, I ran out to see if one would have my name carved into the side, until one year my father took me aside and told me that would never happen. When stories were told by a brilliant fire in the middle of the long winters, I was forced to sit far at the edge away from the others as if somehow my very presence was tainted. For the longest time, I thought it was just because of the role I played in my family—the seventh daughter raised to be a son in the absence of male offspring. But maybe it was more.