“But you…you are…Water,” I declare dumbly.
“I am a great many things. Fantastic waltzer, for instance. Superb fighter. Halfway-decent cook.” His eyes sparkle with amusement. “Damn near godlike in bed.”
I ignore his attempts at distraction. “Are you so jaded you’d ignore your own destiny? Or simply so selfish you’d doom the rest of the world rather than disturb your own serenity?”
“Careful.” The threat is delivered with such contradictory insouciance, it sends a shiver down my spine. “You speak of things far outside your limited understanding.”
“Of course this is out of my understanding! You’ve just told me I’m one of four keys that, together, unlock the door to the world’s salvation,” I cry, too angry to heed the warning in his words. “Yet, in the same breath, you expect me to blithely accept your utter apathy regarding your own role in it.”
“Apathy is the wisest course, I assure you. The alternative is an exercise in frustration.”
“How? How can that be, when we are already halfway there? When we’ve got two of the four elements sitting across from each other at a table?”
“And a third rapidly closing in, no doubt,” he mutters.
“What?”
He ignores my pointed query. “I thought our history lesson over, but it seems I need to clarify some minor points for your half-developed mind to adequately grasp our current reality.”He leans in slightly, tone tightening. “The first four Remnants were born over two hundred years ago, in the wake of the uprising. Some think their souls entered this world the exact moment the emperor’s fled it.”
“So?”
“So, had the original tetrad found one another, do you think we would be sitting here having this conversation?”
“I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly. Every time a Remnant dies—and wecandie, do not doubt that, though we heal quickly and are harder to kill than most—the element is reborn as someone else. Sent back to start again, in a new body. A new soul.” His eyes scan my face. “You’re, what…seventeen? Eighteen?”
“Twenty.”
“And scrawny.” His lips twitch when I make a crass hand-gesture that suggests precisely where he can shove his unwanted opinions. “That means, somewhere in this world, around twenty years ago, the last wind weaver died. Probably painfully, on the end of a noose or at the point of a sword.”
I cannot disagree with that assumption, seeing how closely it aligns with my own near fate. My mind spins with curiosity, caught up in thoughts of the others who came before me. Past incarnations of Air. How many had there been? Who were they? Where did they live? What had their lives looked like before being snuffed out?
“And then came you,” he drawls, drawing me back to the present. His head tilts in thought. “Yet, the last Air Remnant I can recall meeting must’ve been…oh, at least seventy years ago now. However many others lived and died in that half-century gap of time between her demise and your birth, I have no idea. It could be one; it could be one hundred. If they survived longer thaninfancy, born into the hands of superstitious mortal peasants…If they made it safely from the clutches of murderous kings…I never had the pleasure of meeting them.”
I blink, stunned into silence. The man sitting across from me is not a day over thirty. I’d stake my life on it.
“How…” I swallow my surge of disbelief. “How old are you?”
“That’s a very rude question, according to every woman I have ever known.”
“I’m not in the mood to jest.”
“Pity.”
“Could you just give me a straight answer?”
“Oh…” He waves a hand, a noncommittal gesture. “A couple centuries, give or take a few years. Though I’ve been told I don’t look a day over a hundred and fifty.”
My eyes bug out of my head. Only the highest fae—fae royalty—are gifted preternaturally long life. Ordinary halflings are seldom afforded the luxury of growing old—at least, not in the Midlands—but the rare few who are live no longer than a hundred and fifteen years. Perhaps a hundred and twenty. And in those exceptional cases, they surelylooktheir age. But there is not one wrinkle or age spot anywhere to be seen on this stranger’s perfect face. His dark, lush hair has not a single strand of silver.
I can only manage to gasp a bewildered, “What?”
“As I’ve already mentioned, Remnants are difficult to wound and even harder to eliminate entirely,” he says, as if I am rather slow of wit. “Long life-span. Quick healing. You will soon learn.” His eyes drop to my wrist as I reach again for my wine, noting the faded scars that ring the flesh there. “If you have not already.”
I swallow a large sip. My head is beginning to spin—eitherfrom the deluge of information or from drinking on an empty stomach. “So, unless someone takes pains to kill me, I will simply live…forever?”
“Perhaps.”