“Is it?” he asked mildly.
“Yes.” The fucking audacity. I was a hairsbreadth away from stomping my foot in rage. “Give it back!”
“I quite like it.”
“It’smine!”
“How about we make a deal? You go back inside, like a good candidate, and I’ll return the dagger?”
My eyes narrowed. “You can’t make deals over things that don’t belong to you.”
He waved a haphazard hand. “My house, my rules.”
Anger swelled like a rising tide, swift and brutal. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He turned to look at me. He spread his arms wide. “Where else will you go?”
I stepped off the marble and granite. Cold air kissed my cheeks and my gaze flitted around the surroundings.
Snowy summits enclosed us, bleak, white and endless. Valhan House was nestled somewhere in between two slopes and was imposing in both size and structure. It was triple the size of the governor’s house in Serila and striking in its architecture, grandiose like something reminiscent of another time.
I swallowed, turning back to find Kilian staring at me.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be lucky and find someone who’ll help me survive. The elven can’t all be soulless monsters like you.”
His ensuing huff could have been construed as laughter. “None of them will help you. They’re all as invested in the outcome of the Trials as I am.”
“Why?” I glared at him.
He gave me a bored look. “Because they care about saving the world.”
My lip curled. Of course he was going to give me some sarcastic, illogical response.
“We’re wasting time out here,” he drawled. “Everyone else has already started on the training, so if you’re done trying to escape, can we go back inside?”
I pressed my lips together, trying to figure out my next course of action. How I might wrest my dagger from him and drive it into his nearest artery. I was enraged at how absolutely powerless I was over the situation. I had zero control over what happened to me, or when it happened.
Even if I did somehow manage to get away, Kilian was right. Where would I sleep tonight? The air was so frigid I feared I might become hypothermic if I stayed out in the courtyard for another few minutes. What would I eat? Elven food was toxic to the mortal digestive system. I’d be dead in minutes. In fact, I was struggling to come up with a solution that didnotresult in me dying in minutes.
The glaringly obvious one was, of course, returning inside and continuing with the Trials.
“Your lips are turning blue,” Kilian remarked.
My teeth clattered against each other, and I just barely resisted rubbing my hands over the thin fabric of my long sleeve.
“You’re not going to make me haul you over my shoulder and carry you back inside, are you?”
The fight sizzled out of me. Icy cold seeped into my bones and lodged itself in my marrow. My survival instincts shuffled around, recognizing not freezing to death as an immediate priority.
I crossed to him and reached for my dagger. To my surprise, he didn’t resist. I stared at him warily as I sheathed it into my belt loop.
“Come on, then,” he said, like I was a sheep he was herding back into its pen.
I’d tried to escape, but I knew a lost cause when I saw one. The cards had never been stacked in my favor.
Sighing, I started back toward the house.
Kilian Valhan faced me across the rubber mat, his arms folded casually across his wide chest.