Chapter 35
CHAPTER
“Wait.” I ignored Barberro’s bow, too overcome by the rattle of truth in my bones to fully process his dipped head. “How many years ago did you say Chrysanthia disappeared again?” I asked Steeler.
He began to pace in circles around me, his forehead furrowed in concentration.
“Five hundred.”
“Five hundred and seventeen, to be exact,” Barberro said, straightening and raising a finger.
“So… what would it be? Four hundred and ninety-eight years after her sudden disappearance, Chrysanthia showed up here? On the island?” I glanced up, as if to make sure the dome still loomed overhead.
Sure enough, the faintest shimmer stretched across the sky through spare gaps in the bulging clouds.
“But how would she have made it through her sister’s shield? ”
“Perhaps she has been here whole time,” Barberro suggested. “It would be just like traitor to blame Her Majesty for Princess’s disappearance, only to have kidnapped her and brought her here herself. The wretched fyka.”
I assumed fyka wasn’t the nicest word in the Sorronian vocabulary, but I didn’t ask what it meant.
Had my mother really been locked away in the prison on Bascite Mountain for nearly five centuries before she escaped to meet Fabian and gave birth to me?
Had she been caught again, lugged back like Jenia, chained up with the rest of the original Good Council?
Or was she hiding somewhere in the depths of the jungle?
I shook my head. The jungle would have whispered to me about it if she was still here, hiding within its nest. And besides.
.. “Lord Arad said my mother had come from the sea,” I said out loud.
“She must have snuck through the dome somehow...” But how?
And why? I glanced down at my sheath and whipped out the knife in a sudden flurry as a thought came to me.
“Were you alive when the three sisters were still united?” I asked Barberro.
“Whoa there.” Barberro went cross-eyed in his attempt to track the knife. “I was boy, yes. Ten years of age when Princess disappeared. I lived near palace, but only saw her handful of times.”
So he wouldn’t have developed his power of Magnification by then. But maybe he’d still noticed little details. “Did you ever see Chrysanthia carrying this around?” I brandished the knife again.
Barberro zeroed in on the curved blade, as if pinpointing and memorizing the actual elemental disposition of it.
“I’m afraid not, girl with curly hair. Your mother always seemed to float around like feather back then—she would not have let that weigh her down. But a lot can change in five hundred years, no?”
I supposed it could. And I supposed it didn’t matter why Chrysanthia had had a knife or how she’d slipped through Dyonisia’s dome all those years ago or what she’d been doing for those five hundred years of absence.
No, what mattered right now was what I could do with this new knowledge humming in my blood. Leave the island. Board the ship, where nobody would cut my head off with Old Veracious. Sail away and never look back.
Steeler stopped pacing to snag my gaze, as if he’d sensed exactly where my thoughts had flowed. Because he’d been there all along.
I lifted my chin at him. “What would you have me do?”
A slight cock of his head. A flare of his nostrils that was so miniscule, I might have missed it if I hadn’t memorized every piece of him. “What?”
“What would you have me do right now if you could have your way?” I repeated, and I could feel my eyes blazing, cutting holes through his own. “If you didn’t need anyone else’s input, would you leave me here or take me with you?”
I already knew my own answer, but I needed to hear his. Out loud. Right now.
“Would I take you with me?” Steeler repeated, uncrossing his arms and forging a step closer.
The absolute disbelief etched all over his features had me thinking that I was wrong. That I’d mistaken his intentions. That he wasn’t still in love with me as he’d claimed on the beach that day.
Then he came a step closer. The world shrunk into a cocoon around us, and the scent of his black bamboo filled my senses until I could feel his presence in every pore.
“Tell me the truth,” I whispered up at him.
Even if he didn’t love me anymore, even if he didn’t want me to leave the island with him—well, for some reason, that would hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but I could handle it.
I didn’t want anything less than undiluted honesty from this male ever again.
“Are you sure?” Steeler breathed down at me. “My answer isn’t very… nice.”
My heart dropped a fraction, but I nodded, my resolve tightening. “Don’t censor it. Tell me exactly what you’re thinking.” Don’t keep trying to protect me from the truth—whatever that may be.
“Fine, then.” Steeler’s face took on an open earnestness I’d never seen before.
“If I could choose what to do with you right now, little hurricane, I wouldn’t just take you away from here.
I would whisk you away to some remote corner of the universe, where I would keep you all to myself forever and ever and fuck you into a whimpering puddle, until every single worry in that beautiful mind of yours melted away and pleasure was the only sensation you ever felt again.
That’s what I would do right now if I could have my way. ”
Oh.
My stomach thrashed with butterfly wings, and Steeler’s fangs were so close, and my fingers were finally reaching up to touch them—
“We can go right now, yeah?” Barberro interrupted. “Then you can get own room on ship and I won’t have to watch? Or do you jungle people prefer the wild? If so, interesting concept, I will have to try it with—”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Steeler said.
Barberro stuck a finger in his ear. “I’m sorry? I don’t believe I heard you right. We just found out girl with curly hair is not traitor’s daughter and you said you’re…”
“Not going anywhere,” Steeler confirmed, taking a step away from me and shattering the trance that seemed to grip me. “Because what I want to do and what Rayna wants to do are two different things.”
I blinked. Reassessed my surroundings and wrenched in a sharp breath of air that scattered the wings in my belly.
For once, Steeler was right—though he must have dissected those creeping thoughts of mine before my subconscious could form them into clear shapes for me.
“I can’t go,” I said, turning to Barberro, if only so I wouldn’t get locked in a Steeler-induced trance again. “If Dyonisia is building an army… I can’t just leave my friends and family here.”
For even if she didn’t try to attack the queen soon—even if Fabian and Don, Emelle and Lander, and all the others could live out their lives semi-peacefully—there was always a chance she’d decide it was time.
There was always a chance my fathers and the family I’d made at the Esholian Institute would find themselves facing a queen they had no hope of surviving.
And that was a chance I wasn’t willing to risk.
“We could take them with us,” Steeler suggested quietly.
“You heard Nara in my memory. Anyone with Wild Whispering, Object Summoning, Element Wielding, Shape Shifting, or Mind Manipulating can make it through the dome just fine. And even if they couldn’t, I would Walk them through—to wherever you want to put them. ”
The way he said that, with a hint of a cringe, made my heart pause.
“Where would we put them, Steeler?” Not on the ships, surely—I doubted the Fated General would want to keep a whole pack of humans onboard even if they passed the Old Veracious test.
Now Barberro was cringing, too.
“I don’t know,” Steeler answered finally, hefting up his chin with a look of defiance.
You want the truth from now on? Well here it is.
I wasn’t sure if he’d grazed my mind with those words or if I could just read his expressions like a map at this point.
“The human territories aren’t safe—they’re run over with vampires.
And Sorronia is prejudiced against humans, so I don’t really know of a place we could take your friends or family.
But we can try to find somewhere, if you’d like. ”
I’d turn over the world for you, if that’s what it takes.
That was his voice in my mind, dark and fathomless as always.
I shivered, even as an idea hacked through me.
“Or we could keep the island for ourselves.”
Barberro crossed his arms. Steeler spiked an eyebrow.
“Go on.” His lips hitched up at the corner, obviously amused by the spark I could feel flickering in my eyes.
“Think about it.” I began to pace, just as he had before.
“We get rid of Dyonisia, and we get rid of the whole damn system. The bubble pops. No more Branding. No more Final Tests. No more exiles or torture chambers or secret readying for war.” And everyone in that prison would be set free—including my mother, if she was up there.
Steeler’s attention moved with me as I paced.
“And how, Rayna, are you planning on getting rid of the second most powerful faerie to ever exist in Sorronian history?”
For a moment, I felt like I had my own fangs as I stopped to flash him a grin. The idea churning in my mind felt like a hurricane of hail and ice and snow and every cold, sharp thing the last six months had carved into me.
“We won’t have to touch Dyonisia at all.” I turned to Barberro. “If Nara can fill those pills of hers with poison and I give that stash to Kitterfol like I promised him I would…”
“…then Kitterfol will poison Dyonisia for us,” Steeler murmured, “thinking he’s slipping her a love potion instead. God of the Cosmos, woman. I’m actually starting to fear you.”
I couldn’t find it in me to smirk, because the idea was risky.
But if Kitterfol was truly as power-hungry and love-crazed as I thought, he’d go to any lengths to crush up those pills and get them into Dyonisia’s system—and how would he know if they were poisoned?
He still didn’t know I was a Mind Manipulator, and at this point I was fairly certain I could learn how to feed him those mental lies without Steeler and I having to… act out certain scenes again.
“Yes, yes.” Barberro was nodding, his gaze distant as if listening to a conversation in his own head. After a few moments, his eyes refocused on me. “Nara says she can do it… but it’s very hard to poison faeries, and she doesn’t have right ingredients on ship.”
“Well…” I gestured around us, at the liverworts and bluffs bursting with fungi and the thick overflow of foliage looming over us in every direction. “It’s a good thing we live on a jungle island where ingredients aren’t hard to come by, isn’t it?”
I could feel Steeler’s smug pride wash over me, but I chose to ignore it for now. If I was going to do this, I needed every last dreg of mental clarity… and whatever it was that always seemed to radiate from him and wrap me up in a chokehold was not helping with that.
“What does Nara need to get the job done?”