Page 65 of The Iron Hex

The woman looked past Eira to where Evangeline and Hugo still stood before she motioned the men at the door away with her hand. Relief washed through Eira, but she knew this wasn’t the last of the danger here. Five men and a barmaid, no matter how clearly influential the woman was, did not make a town. They would need to be careful.

“This girl just saved you,” she said directly to Hugo, and Eira had never seen him look so small. He towered over her, was physically stronger than her, but there was something about this town that had him feeling like he was lower than dirt, and Eira could see it in the way his shoulders hung. “Boys, you can go.”

The barmaid handed Eira a set of keys, closing Eira’s fingers around them gently. “I’m Catrina. You let me know ifyouneed anything, okay? You and your friend can come down for dinner tonight but... the hunter shouldn’t. Not if he wants to keep his head,” she said, before tapping Eira’s hand and letting go.

“Understood.” Eira nodded.

Eira turned to the other two, handing one key to Evangeline for her to give to Hugo. The woman wouldn’t touch him, and Eira understood. They didn’t know that Hugo wasn’t that person anymore. Tension followed them as they walked up the steps to their rooms, Evangeline silently opening the door and holding it for Eira.

“I’ll be there in a second,” Eira said, Evangeline tilting her head curiously in response.

Eira turned to Hugo, who had his back turned to her, unlocking his room, which sat directly across from Evangeline and Eira’s. “Are you okay?” she asked, knowing the answer but wanting, desperately, for Hugo to trust her enough to tell her.

He paused, and Eira watched his mouth. She wanted nothing more than to kiss him, to make him feel like he truly was the protector he’d shown himself to be.

“Not really,” he said gruffly, his voice thick with some unnamed emotion.

“Were—” Eira was interrupted by a man walking out of his room and down the hallway, and she watched as Hugo turned his head toward the door, obscuring his face, his hair falling across it to obscure it even more. Eira smiled briefly at the man as he passed, wondering if he’d lost someone to the Iron Empire’s hand.

“Were there a lot of witches here?” she finally asked, once the man was out of earshot.

“It’s a small town, so nothing like the numbers in the capital,” Hugo said, twisting the doorknob and inching the door open. “But there were enough to leave a scar.”

“I just... I wanted to remind you that you are allowed to grow. And I’m glad that you have grown,” Eira said.

He turned to her, an unknowable, almost haunted look in his eyes as he digested what Eira had said to him. Hugo placed his hand on Eira’s cheek and her skin lit up, the heat of his touch and the emotion behind his eyes making her heart swell.

“Thank you, Eira,” he said before stepping into his room and shutting the door behind him.

A while later, Evangeline and Eira found themselves tucked into a corner table in the now-bustling tavern, eating some sort of deliciously buttery roast bird without Hugo.

“This is still weird for you,” Evangeline asked. “Isn’t it?”

Eira laughed. “Of course it is. You both have basically unlimited memories of me that are just gone, and it’s my own fault that they’re gone.”

“I’d actually endeavor to say that it’s actuallymyfault that your memories are still gone,” Evangeline retorted.

“I wanted to protect us, and I did the magic wrong. That’s not your fault,” Eira countered, shrugging slightly before looking down at her meal.

“I saw how you do magic once we fled the capital, Eira. If you made a mistake, it was a fluke.” Evangeline leaned forward. “Although, I had no idea you could doanymagic before we had to run.”

“What?” Eira blinked, remembering that Hugo had told her he didn’t know about her magic... but had Eira kept her magic a secret from her best friend too?

Evangeline nodded. “I never once saw you doanymagic. I didn’t even know you were a witch. You kept it completely separate from your role as viscountess. I guess... I guess, when I think about it, you probably didn’t need to do magic because it wasn’t relevant to what you did with me, what you were training to do to aid me when I took the throne. Then we fled in the middle of the night on the night of the uprising, and you started casting this and that, every type of magic I could possibly think of!”

“I can only imagine how well you reacted to that,” Eira sighed sarcastically, shocked that her whole life had been a lie.Being a viscountess, of course she didn’tneedmagic, but Eira had to wonder what had motivated her to hide it from everyone. She had a sneaking suspicion that in the past she must have known that her magic was strange and unusual, or else why wouldn’t she have shared it with everyone? Maybe that was why hiding her magic had come so easily even after she’d forgotten her past... it was muscle memory for her too.

“We had a fight about it in Lindow a few weeks after we ran,” Evangeline recalled. “We’d been on the run, operating the best we could as two noblewomen hiding from the Iron Empire, and when we finally had a moment to breathe... well, we fought. It was messy—you tripped me with vines in our campsite.”

“I didn’t!” Eira gasped, hand to her mouth. Both Hugo and Evangeline still wanted to be around her despite the lies she’d told them all, and that gave Eira some peace.

“You did!” Evangeline laughed. “And then I threatened to have you killed, at which point you made some sort of comment about me not being the crown princess anymore. We didn’t talk for a whole day after.”

“What was our plan? After we ran?” Eira asked, curious now.

“At first we were going to run to Corisia, since my father had brokered such a strong alliance with them and I had the betrothal lined up.” A betrothal. Evangeline should have been married by now. Eira wondered to who, but bit her tongue. Evangeline didn’t need to explain everything to Eira; she’d have her memory back soon. She hoped.

“Why didn’t we?” Eira tapped the glass holding her drink thoughtfully. This part, though,thispart she was curious about. Memory magic was such an extreme solution to the predicament they’d found themselves in in Cilirien... but how had they gotten there?