Free A Soul for Vengeance by Crista McHugh Page A

head, but his expression said otherwise. “I just found it odd you’d choose that book over all the others on the shelf.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, to start with, it’s in Elvish, which is much more difficult to learn than some of the human languages.”
    “He’s lying,” Loku whispered in the back of her mind. “Look at him—he’s terrified you’ll learn the truth.”
    Varrik’s eyes moved from side to side, lingering at the door for several seconds like he wanted to flee the room. His hands trembled. And when he caught her looking at them, his eyes widened, and he balled them up into fists. But it was too late. “No, there’s something else about this book that you don’t want me to know about.”
    “Perhaps.” An odd mixture of emotions washed across his face. Fear. Anguish. And lastly, hope, as though he wanted her to pursue this conversation even though he didn’t want to answer her question.
    She flipped through the vellum pages and tried to decipher the jumbled scribbles of lines, swirls and dots, failing miserably. “Can you read this, Loku?”
    “Of course I can, you foolish child.”
    “Then tell me what it says, you disembodied jerk.”
    But instead of the chaos god answering her, it was Varrik who said with the same hesitancy he always bore around her, “That is The Epic of Engellik .”
    A rush of memories slammed into her. Arden heard her mother’s voice reciting her favorite bedtime story about a knight sent on a series of quests to eventually find his true love and win her heart. Every evening, her mother would tell her just a piece of the story, enough to set her imagination flying and leave her anxious to hear the next installment. She’d lost count how many times she’d heard the entire tale before her mother died, but it was enough for her to recall specific quotes. “And Engellik looked at the goddess and asked, ‘Why did you choose me out of all the men in this realm?’”
    “‘Because you have the bravest heart,’ the goddess replied,” Varrik continued, finishing the line from the story.
    Arden’s eyes swam with irksome moisture she refused to let fall. She closed the book and held it to her chest. She’d come for her mother’s necklace and had discovered instead another mystery. “How did my mother come to know a Gravarian legend?”
    “Because I read it to her every night.” His voice, so soft and solemn, spoke of gentler times, of moments shared by two people in love, and of longing for a time in his life he wished he could recapture.
    “Was that before or after he had his way with her?”
    Arden suppressed her scream of frustration. “Shut up, Loku!”
    But even his lewd comment couldn’t shake the turmoil brewing inside her heart. Sweat prickled her skin, and her heart raced. Her breath couldn’t come fast enough. Everything she thought she knew was being challenged once again. The man she’d always pictured as being cruel and uncaring, of casting her mother aside once he’d finished using her, suddenly became more complicated. How could her mother continue to recite the same story told to her by a man who’d wronged her unless…?
    She raised her eyes to Varrik and saw the answer she feared.
    The only way her mother could continue to recite the same story told to her by a man who’d wronged her was because perhaps he never did wrong her.
    Her heart, so full of bitterness for so many years, squeezed and thudded against her chest. She tightened her hold on the book, pressing it against her ribs as though it could dull the painful truth she wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
    Varrik ran his finger along the top of the book. “I brought this with me to Ranello years ago. It’s the very same book I read to Alisa night after night.” He withdrew his finger, letting it hover inches above the spine before adding, “I find it strange that you would be drawn to it without even knowing what it contained unless a shared memory can weave magic that neither of us