Chapter 5
Damned Caspian and his damned desire.
Of course I could feel it along with my own. By the end of training, I was flushed and sweaty and about ready to jump him right there on the mat.
He seemed about ready to let me, too. The evidence of his feelings was hard beneath me as I straddled him after finally managing to take him to the floor.
Only a traitorous gasping wheeze seemed to shake him from his desire. He sat up and held me away from him, insisting I take time to shower while he got me a dose of medicine for my lungs.
He disappointingly did not join me in the shower.
“I’m fine,” I insisted when he asked for the third time if I was sure I didn’t want to rest instead of visiting the library. “The medicine helped. I just overdid it.”
It was true. The siren medicine seemed to work wonders for my lungs, enough that it wasn’t until the end of the hour-long lesson that I began to feel winded. I made a mental note to ask Caspian to take me to meet the healers so I could ask about the strangely sweet tonic.
“If that was overdoing it, you’ve got a lot of training ahead,” he grumbled, guiding me down a stone passage that led to the library. “You need to build up your stamina.”
“I can think of other ways we could do that,” I teased, feeling his pulse of desire twine through my own.
He quickly looked away, and I wondered if he could feel it too. If, perhaps, he already knew on some level that we were mates.
I would tell him the truth later.
I had never been in the cliff dwellings on the Silent Isles, but I wondered if they were similar in layout at these cliffs. Surely not, since hidden passages wouldn’t have been necessary for the sirens living there hundreds of years before.
“How did you excavate these tunnels?” I asked, admiring the swirling pattern of moonstone that webbed over the walls and lit the way. “It must have taken centuries.”
“Many of the passages were already like this when we arrived,” he replied, his thumb stroking absently over the back of my hand as he held it. “Old dwarven settlements from before they united under a single king.”
“That was lucky,” I mused, noting that Caspian had to stoop slightly in the section of the hallway. Dwarf tunnels indeed.
“Luck had nothing to do with it, Urchin,” he replied with a wry grin. “We had extensive maps of the lands surrounding the isles. We brought them with us when we left. Spent the first fifty years looking for a suitable home.”
“How do you know?” I asked. Caspian couldn’t have been alive that long ago, since he had only been king for fifteen years.
“Records,” he said with a shrug. “Some first-hand accounts. Here we are.”
Caspian stopped in front of a set of stone doors that blocked the end of our hallway. Unlike most of the doors in the cliffs, which consisted of curtains disguised as moss or plant life, these doors were blocks of stone that had been carved with images of flora and fauna and strange symbols I didn’t recognize.
“Dwarven writing,” Caspian said, noticing my eyes scan the doors. “Ana has translated most of it, but none of it tells us much about their history.”
He pushed the huge blocks, which looked to be half a foot thick, despite being at least two inches shorter than Caspian. They opened into a cavern that had me gasping in delight.
The room was huge, carved entirely from the stone of the cliffs and so tall that several narrow stone staircases worked their way up the levels of the library. Shelves upon shelves of books lined the walls all around the cavern and circled the main floor like markings on a giant sundial. A series of small windows were carved near the top of the room, perhaps large enough for a single siren to fly through. Sunlight streamed through them and bounced off of several mirrors embedded strategically into the walls, enhancing the glow of the moonstone and casting the whole room in daylight.
In the center was Ana, books piled high around her circular desk. Several reading areas with worn armchairs and ancient tables circled her space, and the distant fluttering of wings and movement of figures against the walls of the cavern told me there were other archivists working in the space.
It was hard not to stop at every shelf, each one crammed with books and scrolls in a way that was simultaneously both haphazard and excessively organized. Letters and numbers carved into each shelf indicated the type of book or manuscript stored there, and I wondered if Ana had it all memorized.
Seas, we had lost so much more in the Exile than I had ever realized.
“You’re here,” Ana said, beaming brightly as Caspian practically dragged me from the shelves. “I’ve pulled far too many books for us to get through in one afternoon, but I was too excited to restrain myself. Are you alright?”
I looked up to find Ana frowning slightly, Caspian’s lips tilted in a bemused grin. “She’s just overwhelmed,” he drawled, giving my hand a squeeze as he jerked his head toward Ana. “Do you plan to say hello, Urchin, or do you need a moment alone with the books?”
I blushed, trying to hide the flare of heat at his suggestive tone with a scowl. Caspian raised his brow as if he saw right through me. “Libraries should not get you so hot and bothered, Marina,” he murmured, leaning in close so Ana couldn’t hear. “But it’s good to know we have options.”
“You’re an ass,” I hissed, trying to quell the flood of heat.
His knowing smile made me want to smack him. “You like it.”
“Ahem,” coughed Ana, flushing pink under her brown skin. “Do you two need a moment?”
“We’re fine,” I said hastily, casting another scowl at Caspian, which he returned with a wink. “His feathery majesty was just leaving.”
“I leave her in your capable hands, Ana,” Caspian said with a short bow.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Ana said, looking interestedly between us. “Want me to fly her back later?”
“I’ll come get her,” Caspian replied, turning to me and putting his hands on my shoulders. “Make good choices, Urchin,” he warned, leaning down and brushing his lips against my cheek. In a low voice meant just for me, he added, “We’ll talk about everything tonight.”
I shivered, both at the brush of his lips and at the promise of all of our secrets finally coming out. He waited for me to nod before sweeping upward, a gust of wind conjured to take him flying up, up, up toward the windows in the ceiling.
“He likes to make a dramatic exit, that’s for sure,” Ana sighed, her hands on her hips and her face tilted up as she watched him fly away. She looked back down at me and grinned. “Ready to dig in?”
It was possibly one of the best days of my life, and certainly interesting enough to push thoughts of bedding Caspian temporarily from my mind.
Any question I had about siren history, Ana not only answered, but found a book that gave me far more detail than I truly needed.
Many of the stories were ones I had read already about their warrior people and the magic of their song, but she also showed me a collection of manuscripts from when the selkies and sirens ruled the Silent Isles together.
“It’s strange to see,” I mused, poring over my fifth or sixth manuscript about everyday, mundane rulings between the two intertwined kingdoms. “And they really just ruled side-by-side like this? For centuries?”
We had settled into one of the reading areas, books and manuscripts piled high around us. Ana sat across from me, her blue dress a flowing waterfall of silk, so unlike Zephyr's preferred attire and my borrowed leathers for training. She watched me intently as I marveled over her people’s history.
“They did,” Ana said, riffling through the manuscripts and pulling one that looked even older than the one I had been examining. She had donned special gloves to handle the ancient paper, and she laid it out gingerly on the table before me. “But before that, they were truly one kingdom.”
She pointed to the top of a chart—some kind of royal genealogy—and I traced the various branches with my eyes. “A siren queen and a selkie king,” I marveled, looking down at generations of mated kings and queens who ruled their people as one. Near the bottom, the tree stopped. “What happened here?”
Ana frowned. “This is where the original royal line ended,” she said, pointing at four female names. “The final mated selkie and siren pair had no children, and when they passed, several warring houses fought for dominance over the Isles.” She grimaced as if this part of history were distasteful, reaching for another document that she unrolled atop the genealogy. It looked to be some kind of treaty or contract, signed by two hands. “The only thing that ended the warfare was a truce between a selkie house and a siren house. Both lords had mated one of their kind, and their sons became dual kings, rather than mated monarchs. For some reason—possibly our peoples’ own hubris, or a desire for power, or just intolerance—there were no more mated sirens and selkies in the royal line for several centuries. It became a taboo, and intermated pairs chose to remain hidden or leave the isles rather than face discrimination for their love.”
“Until five hundred years ago,” I pointed out, looking at her with a raised brow. “When the siren princess and selkie prince were mated.”
“Yes,” she replied sadly. “But we know, of course, how that ended.”
“And we all just forgot?” I asked, waving my hand at the royal family tree. “We forgot that, for centuries, we’d been united?”
Excitement was building in me. Selkies and sirens had mated in the past. Had ruled together. Caspian and I could do this. I could tell him that we were mates, let myself love him the way I wanted, and we could bring our people together once again.
“This happened thousands of years ago,” Ana said, gesturing to the manuscripts on the table. “Thousands of years for the stories of the mated selkie and siren royals to fall to myth. Our scholars only rediscovered this after the Exile, when we had fled with as much of our history as we could. And some of the sirens who lived through the Exile are unwilling to imagine a reunified kingdom. I suppose that the scholars and kings who let history be buried wished our people to remain at odds. Perhaps it was easier to seize power with a common enemy. Or perhaps they simply stopped believing in the blessing of Melusine.”
“Melusine?” I echoed, frowning at that unfamiliar name. “Who is Melusine?”
Ana smiled another sad smile and dug through the pile of manuscripts. “I suppose her stories have been buried by the selkies, if you don’t know her.” She had to move a stack to retrieve the scroll she wanted, far at the bottom of the pile of historical documents. When she unrolled it, I gasped.
The text was indecipherable, some long-forgotten language that I couldn’t hope to read. But the top half of the manuscript held a beautiful illustration of a female with both siren wings and a selkie tail.
“She’s on Caspian’s ship,” I said, pointing to the figure. “Or she was, before it sank.”
“She is the figurehead on all of our ships,” Ana corrected, stroking the image with a delicate, gloved finger. She pointed to the sky, in which I could now make out the shape of a face. “This is Zephrus, god of the sky.” She moved her finger to the illustrated waves where another face was visible. “And Undine, goddess of the sea.”
“They have names?” I asked, staring at the face of the sea as if I should have known her name. “I suppose Zephyr is named for your god?”
“She is,” Ana confirmed, smiling at the mention of her mate. “And these are our gods, Marina.”
“And who is Melusine?” I asked, looking again at the figure between the sea and the sky.
“She was their daughter,” Ana explained, her finger tracing Melusine’s illustrated wings. “Daughter of sea and sky, and goddess of the Silent Isles. The myths say that Melusine created the isles. Unable to be happy wholly in the sky with her father or the sea with her mother, she created a place between them. A place where the peoples of her parents could live in harmony together.”
“You believe she was real?” I asked, frowning down at the image.
“As real as any of our gods and goddesses,” Ana replied with a shrug. “The pantheon of Annwyn is complicated and their stories vast, but I feel the call of Zephrus in my blood when I fly.”
I nodded, something tightening in my heart as I remembered the tug of the sea, the feeling that she was real and present and intimately known to me, the rush of her power in the currents as I swam.
As if in response to my thoughts, I felt something tug beyond the cavern walls. Felt the waves crash upon the rocks as if saying, Yes, I am still here. Was she Undine? Did it really matter if I knew her true name?
“And where is Melusine now?” I asked, tearing my gaze away from the manuscript to look at Ana. “What happened to her?”
“No one knows,” she said, her shrug a little too casual to be completely convincing. “Some believe she sleeps beneath the isles, powering our magic. That it’s why we are weakened by our exile. Others believe that she died, heartbroken by our people’s war, and that her spirit—” She cut herself off, head snapping around as if she heard something. I listened too.
It was quiet. No rustling of feathers from the other archivists. No faint screech of gulls through the windows.
But there, beneath the silence, was a faint note. A siren song.
“Cover your ears, Marina!” Ana hissed, grabbing my wrists and pressing my hands hard over my ears.
The faint note was muffled, and I shook my head to dislodge the magic that I hadn’t even noticed winding its way into my mind. Everything felt slightly fuzzy, and I blinked several times as Ana frantically scrambled to her desk and found parchment and a pen. She scribbled something on the paper and thrust it out to me, eyes wide with panic.
My heart stuttered as I read the word she had written.
Hide.
Ana pushed me toward the back of the cavern, away from the stone doors where the sound must be coming from. I ran toward the many shelves, looking back only once to see she had drawn a dagger from somewhere and was holding it before her as if prepared for attack.
With my hands over my ears, I was clumsy, stumbling into bookshelves and knocking over piles of books with my outstretched elbows as I ran through the cavernous library.
Where the seas could I hide? This room was a circle. It wouldn’t take long to discover me, especially if there were sirens after me. They could fly and see the whole blasted room.
I ran for a stone staircase, running up a few steps and looking back toward the center of the room. Several figures stood at the now-open stone doors. I didn’t recognize any of them, but one of them was pointing as if ordering his partners to start searching.
I saw Ana throw a hand up and a wall of wind blocked their progress as I descended again, cursing silently. The song was louder now, and it was making my head swim despite my hands covering my ears.
My best bet would be to keep moving; to weave in and out of the stacks and try to evade capture for as long as possible. In a moment of desperate panic, I threw out a silent scream along the bond I shared with Caspian and tugged hard.
Something tugged back, and I felt Caspian’s sudden panic rise to meet my own.
He was coming.
I kept moving, creeping as silently as I could around the stacks, using the shelves to keep myself upright when a particularly powerful blast of song made it through my hands.
I risked a glance around the next shelf to the center of the room. I couldn’t see Ana, but—there. A shimmer of blue silk spilled across the floor. And next to it…
Blood.
I bit my lip, forcing myself to hold in my scream as I glanced around and risked running to her. I didn’t see anyone–if I was fast, I could pull her to safety.
The song was everywhere, invading my mind and making it difficult to move, but I threw myself toward Ana’s body and reached for her.
She was breathing, although a gash across her temple was leaking blood that turned her gown a horrific mottled purple.
I was about to move her, to drag her behind the circular desk, when blinding pain struck me.
My hands fell from my ears, and the siren song swept me into unconsciousness.