Chapter 34
CHAPTER
The darkness spit us out onto a narrow valley, sandwiched between bluffs that trickled steadily with thin sheets of water in every direction.
“Where are we?”
I untangled myself from Steeler, my knife still clutched in my hand.
For some reason, I’d assumed he’d be taking us to the lighthouse, not this…
oasis of sorts. Mushrooms as fat as my palm burst from the small, crisscrossing ravines running along the sides of the bluffs, and a thick carpet of liverworts gave out steady, warbling drones from underfoot.
A single, dark cloud hovered overhead among a pillow of lighter, fluffier ones.
Steeler shielded his eyes to squint upward, scouring the cliff-line for signs of life or intrusion.
“We’re as far from the ships as we can get without actually leaving the island—just west of Wyndrip, actually.” His jaw flexed. “I’ll go fetch Barberro if you wait h—”
“Steeler?”
He turned to me, that little glass vial still tight in his grip.
“Yes, Rayna?”
“Thank you. For bringing me.”
My heart was still crawling up my throat from that breathless moment I’d feared he would leave me behind again.
Steeler’s mouth instantly softened.
“You deserve to hear it with your own ears, Rayna—you’re right about that. I just have a hard time sharing you.”
I blinked. Surely, he didn’t think this Barberro fellow would be interested in me… romantically?
“Sharing me? With who?”
“The world,” Steeler whispered. “It’s a harsh, unforgiving place full of greedy, manipulative people, and I don’t trust it not to hurt someone like you.”
Just like that, I felt that heat in my stomach rise up my throat in anger this time.
“Someone like me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know.” He threw his head back. “Someone…”
“Someone what?” Deep in the center of my mind, I felt a creak of ice, a stirring of my subconscious. “Do you think I’m weak? Or fragile? Or breaka—”
“Kind!” Steeler burst out. “Soft-hearted. Compassionate.” He took a step forward, pressing the vial into my free hand, closing my fingers around the glass.
“But I’m learning how to trust the other parts of you that aren’t as soft, Rayna—your powers and your bravery and that devious little mind of yours. ”
A brush of dark, fathomless energy against my gate of ice had my knees turning hollow with the trail of hungry promises it seemed to leave in its wake.
“And I trust you to still be here when I get back,” Steeler finished.
Then he was gone.
Knees wobbling, I finally let myself collapse onto a nearby slab of mossy stone, clutching my knife in one hand and the glass vial of Dyonisia’s hair in the other while the liverworts droned around me.
Kind. Soft-hearted. Compassionate.
I’d been terrified that I’d lost all those things along with my memories. Terrified that I’d never actually been kind or compassionate at all, that it had all been a ruse, a trick my mind had played on itself to hide all those darker, wilder parts within.
But maybe… maybe even if I was Dyonisia’s daughter, it didn’t mean I was destined to turn out like her: as harsh and unforgiving as the world Steeler couldn’t trust. Maybe I could still be good because…
Because I was Fabian’s daughter, too. And despite the fact that I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half now, he was the kindest, most compassionate man I knew.
I exhaled into the space between my knees. No matter how this coupling between him and Dyonisia had happened, I could choose which parts of my parents to keep alive in my own blood.
I could choose to be a force of good in a world that needed so much more of that.
For the next two minutes, I sat with my eyes closed, face turned up against the warmth of soft sunlight, listening to the tinkle of water all around me. It was only when a sudden scuffle and a sharp string of foreign curses echoed through the valley that I popped them open again.
Steeler was back, this time with…
I scrambled to my feet. My mouth dropped open at the figure that had doubled over next to him, a massive fist to his gut as he retched.
“Rayna, meet Barberro,” Steeler said through a smirk. “Your… what did you call him? ‘Little faerie man’?”
The seven-foot male with swirling ink patterns on his bald head and glittering hoops in his pointed ears paused his retching long enough to squint at me with small, unassuming hazel eyes.
“Little, you say? Is that why you are staring at me like that, girl with curly hair? Because you thought I’d be little?”
“N-no,” I said, unsure of the temperament behind those words. “I just…thought you’d have bigger eyes, given your power and all.”
“Bigger eyes?” the faerie named Barberro mouthed.
Then, after a too-long beat of silence, the valley echoed with the sudden hawing boom of his laughter.
“Bigger eyes! Ha!” He looked at Steeler over his mountainous shoulder. “I like this girl already. God of Cosmos, I hope you don’t belong to traitor so I don’t have to kill you after this,” he told me cheerfully.
Steeler was between the two of us in nothing more than a breath of wind, all traces of his earlier humor swallowed by instant rage.
“Go ahead and see what happens if you try to touch her. I fucking dare you.”
Barberro blinked and took a half step backward.
“Well, this is new behavior, friend.”
Steeler ignored that. “I already told you, Barberro—Rayna might be good with her knife, but she won’t have to lift a finger if you start to attack her because I will have your mind scrambled in half a second, and you will only be able to unscramble it long after I toss your unconscious ass back onto the ship. ”
“Ati, ati, ati, I get it.” Barberro raised his palms. “Try to kill girl with curly hair: maybe. Succeed at killing girl with curly hair: never.” I tried not to gape when he untucked an entire folded table and chair set that had been hiding beneath the rippling bulge of his arm, setting it up on the flattest surface of ground he could find.
“Now give me traitor’s hair. This might take a bit, so make yourselves veriga. ”
Bewildered, I passed the vial over to Steeler, who passed it over to Barberro, who uncorked it expertly and laid the strand against the table with the gentleness of a nursing mother, not a fanged faerie the size of two Gileons put together.
I cleared my throat in an attempt to normalize the conversation, since tension was still emanating from Steeler in waves.
“So I hear you’re close with Nara, the one who makes our pills?”
If Barberro had dissected anything from the strand of Dyonisia’s hair yet, he didn’t let on. He swiveled his head toward me, those unassuming hazel eyes widened with shock.
“Close? Close?” A gape at Steeler. “Have you told this girl nothing?” He shook his head with a sigh and returned his attention to the table. “Nara is my vigate.”
“Vigate?” I repeated.
“Yes. It means…” He snapped his fingers. “Help me out here.”
Steeler’s shoulders had lowered a notch. In a quieter voice than I’d ever heard him use, he said, “Soulmate.”
“Ahh, yes!” Barberro nodded. “Mate of the soul. Destined lovers for all eternity. Stitched together by Fate.”
“Oh.” I frowned at him, chewing on my lip. “Like a seagull?” When the other two blinked at me, I shook my head and directed a different question at Barberro. “Can your magic eyes detect true love at first sight, or something?”
Once again, silence shuddered from the faerie bent over the table.
Then he lifted his chin and sent a nearby flock of birds bursting from a crag with the boom of his laugh.
“Please, please, please, girl with curly hair, I am begging you with everything I have, don’t be traitor’s daughter. I need to have you over for dinner when this is all over. I make best empinettes in Sorronia.”
Blowing out a sigh, Steeler said, “A soulmate is a very real—though rare and revered—thing for faeries. In Sorronia, there are temples where it is said the seamstress for the God of the Cosmos—Fate—makes it official: an eternal bond that is both more spiritual and carnal than ever before.”
“Very, very carnal,” added Barberro. “I can eat Nara’s pussy for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack time.
Sorry, inappropriate, I know,” he said before Steeler could smack him over the back of the head.
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t know Nara is laughing her voluptuous ass off back at the ship right now. ”
I startled.
“You can…?”
“Read her mind? Yes. Without that cloned mind magic you both have.” Barberro waved a hand in our direction without looking at us.
“And unlike your magic, I can read Nara’s mind no matter how far from her I am.
No matter how much world is between us. I can sense where she is at all times.
I know the moment her mood turns sour because she remembers how I make better empinettes than her.
Ahhh!” He jolted upright. “She just threw shoe at my mind.”
Maybe I should have laughed at that, but something heavy had sunk deep into the pit of my stomach at those words.
“So you’re telling me that… that Fate decided to pair you up together, and you just accepted it? And made it official in a temple?”
The pit in my stomach was telling me it sounded like the opposite of love to be bound to someone by forces outside of your control.
“Oh, no, no, no. You have it flipped around, girl with curly hair.” Barberro was still squinting at the strand of midnight-black hair on the table as he explained, “I met Nara through random chance. We fell in love of own free will. Then we went to temple to see if Fate would accept our choice and bind us together in stitches of… how do you say it? Divine magic. Most couples are not so lucky, but we…”
His face smoothed out into a smile.
Steeler flicked a glance back at me.
“Almost every faerie couple visits the temple to see if Fate will award them the status of soulmates,” he explained in that peculiar quiet voice. “And almost every faerie couple is rejected. For a pairing to be accepted by Fate is… special. As you can probably tell by this asshole’s inflated ego.”