Chapter 32
“What happened?” Selena asked as she watched me hobble out of my room and to the table, a stack of heavy texts under her arm. “Is it from your transition? You were walking well enough when I left you yesterday.”
“You didn’t see me walk yesterday,” I said. ”I sat at the table the entire visit.”
Her mouth parted, then closed. “Were you injured from your transition the morning before? Why didn’t you mention it?”
Unwittingly, my eyes flashed at the door to the worthless traitor who slept on the other side of my wall.
Selena’s gaze followed, recognition sharpening her face. The books landed on my table with a hard thump.
I glanced at them in curiosity, making out the words Economy of a Kingdom and The Growing Wealth of a Working Government before I realized she’d crossed the room. Selena rapped her knuckles over Kye’s door, then stood back with hands on her hips, waiting.
I didn’t want to see him. Didn’t want to hear his voice. Smell his scent. I wasn’t finished working through my anger, and I didn’t trust the things his proximity did to my body.
“Selena,” I hissed.
But she waved me away behind her back.
His door opened. A tall figure slanted into the door jamb, his wry grin clear even across the hall to where I sat at the table.
My brows thrust together. Grabbing one of Selena’s leather-bound tomes, I swerved in my chair, determined not to even look at him.
“Hello, Lady Selena. Come for a friendly chat?” Kye asked, cool and collected over his threshold. Hating myself, I darted a glance toward them.
The tension settled between Selena’s shoulders, and she expelled a soft breath as she crossed her arms. I couldn’t see her face, but I had the impression she was looking him up and down, taking him in with slow, meticulous absorbency.
“This is out of hand,” she said. “Maren has a limp.”
His eyes shifted through my open door to me. “Aw. The island witch is hurt. Need me to kiss it better for you?”
I felt myself go rigid; my teeth clenched as I glared back.
He chuckled, stepping past Selena and inviting himself into my apartment, where he dropped into the chair opposite me and patted his knee. “Go on and set it up here.” His smile widened cruelly. “I don’t mind playing doctor.”
Selena followed, arms still crossed. “Where is Thaan?”
“In the advisory offices,” he answered, staring darkly at me.
“And you had a meeting with him this morning?”
“I had to sit with the council regarding my impending wedding.” He winked, and I felt small sparks of fire light within me. My fingers bore into the armrests of my seat. “A date’s been set. The first day of Eeol.”
She grasped the collar of his shirt, yanking him to his feet. “I’d tell you to keep your hands off her, but I can see how little good it would do,” she snapped. “Take me to him.”
He stepped coolly out of her grasp, adjusting the neck of his rich linen shirt. “With pleasure,” he purred, his eyes trickling over me. He made a show of smoothing the rest of his clothes, dusting his shoulders, and rolling his sleeves up his forearms. His Leihaniian tattoo peeked out, and I felt my muscles harden as my eyes narrowed. Warmth shattered my skin, my heart rate ticked.
I hated the bastard. But he was devilishly hard to look away from.
“Now,” Selena commanded.
Kye chuckled, slowly stalking out of my door.
Selena turned toward me. “I’ll be right back.”
I would have followed them, had I been able to sneak. But I was as mobile as the moon-forsaken book in my lap. I opened it, my eyes flicking to a random sentence inside.
A systematic theory of the management of resources and labor which places a necessary imposition on the public.
What was this drivel? Selena expected me to read this?
She did.
When she returned, Selena neglected to mention what was said between Kye, Thaan, and herself. She sat next to me in a calm huff, charging me with several chapters to read and memorize, though I could see her thoughts lay elsewhere.
Halfway into my chapter, she stood abruptly. Distracted, my gaze followed her.
“You can read this later when I’m not here. I’m calling a coach. Let’s go to the beach.”
Well, I wasn’t turning that down. I snapped the book shut.
It took longer than it should have for me to walk down to the palace drive. But two hours later, my feet sank into cool sand and the scent of salt filled my lungs.
I couldn’t stay angry when I stood beside the sea.
Selena instructed me to wade into the water, moving deeper and deeper, resisting the urge to transition as soon as the salt water combed over my skin. It felt like denying myself the urge to molt. The first time I tiptoed into the waves, I felt myself immediately transition. Footing lost, I fell flat into the shallow water, the sand bursting murky clouds around me. My shimmering gold tail throbbed near the base of my flukes, where my ankle might’ve been.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I hissed, my anger directed at myself more than her.
Selena eyed the ocean with narrow appraisal. She’d brought six empty glass jars, and I watched her plod gracefully through the waves, kneeling to fill them.
“You’ll pour one into your daily bath at the palace,” she said, tightening the lids. “With the dilution of the intense salt, you’ll make some headway without having to return here every day. Not that I’d mind.”
Leaving the jars on the beach, she curled up on a sunny rock in her Naiad form, her sable hair thrown behind her and waving in the wind like a ruffled curtain through an open window. “If you’re frightened or angry, it’ll be harder to control your transition. Your adrenaline will kick in, and whether you plan to fight or flee, your body knows either option is better served by the existence of a tail.”
“I can’t fight with a tail,” I said. I’d changed back to human form to attempt the exercise again. Sitting in the shallow waves, my body had gone rigid under the urge to slough my outer layer and fuse my legs together.
“You will learn,” Selena said with soft confidence. “Relax, Maren. Breathe.” Her eyes flickered to the hourglass beside her on the rock.
I’d made it to two turns of the timer. When I made it to ten, I’d have mastered the skill.
But it was like mastering torture.
After my third failure to keep my human body in the salt, she swung off the rock. “That’s enough. Let’s swim. I want to teach you to catch fish.”
Thank Mihauna.
I’d expected a strict lesson but found that there really wasn’t one. Like all other predators, victory came through following one simple rule: being faster and more cunning than my prey.
Selena showed me how to hunt as a team, one chasing the fish into a trap, the other ready to catch. We followed a school of sea bass, easy to trace from the sheen of their bright, silvery bodies under blue metallic fins.
“Avoid grabbing them from their backs. Their dorsal fins have sharp spines that will slice you,” Selena warned. “They tend to swim up when they’re trying to make a getaway. Come up underneath their belly and take them by surprise.”
Driving headfirst into the school sent them scattering, their shining scales aimed in all directions like hundreds of little mirrors. I was flooded with nostalgia. A far away memory of the beaches of Leihani, my Nani and father chatting in the background while I ran on toddler legs into flocks of birds, watching them lift over my head and fly, squawking in irritation.
Selena burst up from below, a fish in each hand, then let me have a try.
Twenty minutes later, we broke the surface, and despite my forced contract, my aching tail, and my anger at Kye, I found myself laughing.
I hadn’t caught a thing.