27
Jeryn
I’d seen a siren shark before. I had been young, a boy standing in a foreign sea, my limbs frozen in shock. Mesmerized. Terrified. The creature’s skin had glinted pewter and sterling as its fins sheared through the ocean.
Time reversed. The rainforest evaporated, and a new landscape materialized, placing me on that shore. That day.
My body shrank into a child’s form. I could not move, my legs paralyzed in the surf.
How did I get here? When? Why?
I snatched my vial for courage. Saltwater leaked past my lips, the brackish taste making me yearn for home.
Sleighs. Libraries. Wolves.
My fur blanket. My snowflake collection.
Mother. Father.
A desperate body splashed behind me, rushing to get near. I heard feminine panting and someone wailing my name. One of the queens. One of my grandaunts. Silvia.
She shrieked, “Jeryn!”
A knight bellowed, “The prince!”
The siren shark might have snarled, “You!”
I screamed for my parents without making a noise. My heart screamed that they weren’t there. I was going to die, and they weren’t there. I wanted them to slay the shark, but they weren’t there. They loved me, but they weren’t there.
So much hysteria on the beach. Too much.
The shark leaped, its teeth reminding me of icicles. Deadly in their clarity. Painful to behold. The sea monster lashed out, aiming for my jugular.
No. Aiming for her .
My vision cleared, jolting me to the present. I manifested once more in the grotto, witnessing the scene I’d stormed in on.
The siren shark charged with a screech. It whisked toward the hypnotized figure who awaited its approach, her petite limbs immobilized by the sight. Astonished. Spellbound.
I knew the feeling. I also knew wrath.
If the creature touched her, I would tear it to shreds.
I moved, cutting swiftly into the pool. As my arm slung around the woman’s bare waist, memories replayed themselves like a reenactment. Years ago, one of my grandaunts had wrested me from the siren shark. Now I swerved my former captive from the attack, spinning us around so that my frame blocked her from harm, her naked spine aligning with my chest.
Shielding the female, I ripped my scalpel knife from its case and flung my free arm behind me. The blade punctured the shark’s armor, a plate of scales that sprayed crimson into the air. The creature writhed in grotesque fury, its tail thwacking the pool’s surface. With a shriek, it vanished into the depths, strings of blood trailing in its wake.
We stood there. Half-twisted toward the sight, we gawked over our shoulders at the water, oxygen pumping from our lungs. The monster would die soon.
As I swallowed, the acid pungency of vinegar assaulted my palate. Loathing. Disgust. Confusion. For the shark, for myself, for this woman.
And for the stinging sensation across my wrist. The quick invasion seeped into my skin like fluid … or venom.
A sickening feeling lunged through my stomach. I dropped the knife, which hit the water’s shallow end with a splash, then I shoved the woman away. She stumbled to face me, her eyes falling to where I clutched my fist. I covered it with my free hand, unwilling to look.
My throat constricted. I swiped my blade from the pool, rammed the weapon into my sheath, quit the grotto, and fled to the ruin’s cupola while trapping my wrist in a vise grip.
From a distance, the scent of ocean brine suffocated me. In the vicinity, I saw nothing but rainforest ferns instead of frosted alpines. The infernal fucking flora, which confined this infernal fucking wild. Now I knew what it was like to be imprisoned, with this floating woodland caging me in.
I contemplated screaming, unsure how to achieve such a decibel anymore. I had not done so since that day. Grappling my chest, I searched for the vial but remembered I’d lost it in the whirlpool. I seized the ledge, bent over, and dry heaved into the understory.
Staggering upright, I retreated to the opposite side of the cupola, but it didn’t feel right. No place in this hellhole felt right. This wasn’t home, much less Winter.
Balling my hands into fists, I squeezed bones, muscles, veins, tendons. Patience, I told myself while pacing.
It would not happen to me. It would not.
“You will be fine,” my grandaunts had vowed that night.
“You will be fine,” Silvia had said, cradling me although I’d been thirteen, too old for that.
“You will be fine,” Doria had repeated, patting my hair as I wept.
Countless times growing up, I had envisioned the opposite. The siren shark’s bite turning me into a deranged being for three days. Usurping my sanity. Killing me gradually.
I had read the tomes and accounts. I had studied the imported corpse of a siren shark. I knew .
The venom would attack me. It would give me a fool’s mind, cremating the last vestiges of intellect and rationality. I would forget logic and science. My lineage would fade. In its place, madness would surface: eating mouthfuls of sand but calling it snow, drinking from lightning rain, ranting about medicine, lapsing into a melancholy stupor.
Soon, I would become like that little beast. I might wind up choking her, as I’d attempted in the tower. Back then, it had been a bluff, however much I despised myself for having done it in the first place. This time, it might be real, an impulse I wouldn’t be able to control.
I would become more brutal than before. I would go mad and hurt her.
After that, the venom would incinerate my viscera. From there, I would die.
At least my family would be spared. They wouldn’t have to witness that version of me.
But who would occupy my medical den and sit on my throne? Who would replace me?
To the former, not the Court Physician’s apprentice. I deplored that numbskull of a man, who exercised few aspirations in understanding basic anatomy, to the point where he couldn’t tell his cock from his ass.
Clenching my eyes shut, I raised my hand. Opening my eyes, I stared. My fingers shook so violently that I mistook them for someone else’s. Initially, I overlooked the details.
But then, I gave my hand a second inspection. Scratches marred the top of my wrist … from the predator’s scales. Mere scratches.
No broken flesh. No blood. No bites.
With a groan, I hung my head, dicing my quaking fingers through my hair. To have a venomous effect, a siren shark would have to sink its teeth into its prey. But it could have gotten me. From another angle, it could have happened.
The woman’s feet appeared in my periphery. How long had she been standing there?
Having gotten dressed, this spy had the nerve to approach. How dare I risk myself for the likes of her? I wasn’t myself around this female. I didn’t conduct myself as I should.
Frigidness toward born fools came effortlessly because it was practical. Fundamental to testing for the greater good, for the health of Winter’s people. Mine was an indifferent cruelty.
But not with her.
There, I had failed on every account. My malice had become personal for no reason other than her impulsions and those fucking hands. Also, the way she looked at me. Invasive. Daring. With minimal effort, this woman disrupted me, routinely pulling me into fragments.
Her arm stole out. She reached across the divide to make contact.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I growled, tearing myself away.
She wrenched her hand back, yet she didn’t quail. Fleetingly, I wondered how that touch might have changed me. She might have polluted my senses with those fatal hands.
Or not. On the contrary, she might have set me aflame.
“I don’t want your help,” I hissed. “I don’t need it.”
She opened her mouth, but I cut her off. “You’re nothing but a plague. Fools like you burden your families, shame your kin, ruin their livelihoods. Your minds are warped. You mutilate yourselves. You assault people. You’re unnatural—and stop fucking staring at me like that! I am your sovereign, not your inferior! Do you want to know what I’ve done to people like you? I’ve shackled them to chairs. I’ve used them as guinea pigs.”
She grimaced. Motivated by that reaction, I nodded. “I’ve poured untested mixtures down their throats. I’ve contaminated them. I’ve impaired their sensory perception. I’ve hindered their reflexes. I’ve amputated them while they were awake. I’ve administered sleeping vapors to see how it disrupted their breathing—to see if they’d wake up during surgery.”
The woman’s reaction blazed across her face, inflammatory thoughts teetering at the edge of her mouth, the words fixing to leap at me. In the past, I had enjoyed that. From the first moment when she’d cracked my vial, I had wanted her to pay for compromising my judgment, for branding herself into my head.
That had not changed. No, it had not.
It should not.
“You’ll ask what I know about being treated like a fool. In return I would ask, what do you know about treating them?” I sneered. “The mad harm themselves and inflict torment on others. They roar and agonize. They attack out of nowhere, sob out of nowhere. Either they can’t focus, or they finagle. They’re impossible to reach.
“Do you want to know what some of the born did before we caught them? One stole a surgical probe and used it to puncture a child’s eardrum. Another set a communal root cellar on fire, having claimed it housed an evil spirit. Because of that, an entire village starved for weeks until word reached us, from a peasant who arrived at the castle with frost-bitten toes.
“You’ll call these abominations ‘born souls’ and say not all of them are unstable. Indeed, the majority are docile, unable to comprehend the most infantile thoughts and actions, nor the most appropriate ones. They need constant direction lest they should stray. They labor under the Crown’s supervision. Call it slavery, but Royals shoulder the task for those who can’t afford to.
“Poet and Briar may be nonconformists to this rule, but they cannot and will not outweigh the other leaders of this continent. I’m not like them and never will be,” I spat.
Drawing a livid breath, I prowled nearer to her. “As for the mad, I’ve sedated them to prevent hysterics and self-mutilations. I’ve conversed with them, but they haven’t listened. I’ve conducted analyses for correctives and came up empty-handed. Why did I bother? Why did I try to gainsay nature? To fix its mistake. Yet my stresses have been fruitless. All that’s left is using them to develop remedies for everyone else. The end justifies the means. What else are they good for? What else are you good for?”
My voice hitched on that last part. An accusation to which I felt no pride.
Sunset highlighted her tattooed throat, reminding me of a vital fact. What I’d spewed was old information to her; she had already lived that reality. She’d been a captive of Summer, a pawn of Rhys, the spoils of a king’s grudge. Therefore, the rant of a prince held no value to this woman.
In her silence, I heard and saw myself for the first time. Her eyes glinted like metal patina, flinging this moment back at me, explicit in its revelation. It exposed everything wrong and false about my diatribe.
About me.
Ice chipped from its foundation. It crumbled and left a vacancy behind. Something like remorse.
That was before she even spoke. “It hunted you once.”
The answer to that would be a chilled breath away from other answers. Jaw tensing, I glanced away.
She got in front of me, her gaze cutting to the quick. The unspoken questions mounted.
What petrified me more? That I didn’t know how to treat fools? Or that I could become one?
Who was I really trying to heal?
It didn’t matter whether she’d demanded this or not. She smashed her fists into my thoughts, threw flames at me, all without uttering a sound. To achieve that, this little beast needed only to keep staring with those gilded eyes. Another minute of her presence and it would be over for me.
“Leave,” I commanded.
She did not.
“I said, leave.”
She did not leave.
“Go. Away.”
Yet she would not let me forget this. She would force me to face it. Not because she cared or because I deserved her attention. Nowhere near that.
Fuck her. Fuck this woman for appearing in that Autumn cell, after years of struggling to purge her from my mind, after having finally reduced that brief incident to a dream.
Fuck her for tampering with my self-control, my logic, my sense.
Fuck her for breaking the vial like a traitor and tarnishing the one unblemished memory I’d had of her.
The beast shook her head. “It’s a scratch. The Phantom Wild can help you fix that.”
“We’re stranded, beast!” I roared. “This forest cannot fix everything! I can’t eke out an existence here with you. I don’t have the right supplies. No advanced medicines, no actual parchment, no surgical instruments. I don’t have syringes. I don’t have sterilized needles or thread. I don’t even have proper fucking bandages!”
A plant thwacked me in the chest. Squashed in her grip, she pressed a broadleaf into my pectoral. Absently, I took it.
Her irises were reams of sunlight. Thermal. Grating. A golden visage capable of turning me to ash.
“I told you,” she murmured. “I have a name. It’s Flare.”
Snatching flint, rope, and her blade, she marched from the cupola.
I frowned at the plant. The drooping leaf was long and had the texture of linen. However, it stretched like gauze—like a bandage. Whereas the midrib could be an alternative for thread if I constructed a needle, perhaps from a fish bone.
Smart. Resourceful. Always.
My head whipped toward her. “Get back here!” I shouted, knowing she wouldn’t listen.